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标题: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism [打印本页]

作者: Robot    时间: 2009-6-19 00:51     标题: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism

March 27, 2009 / Volume CXXXVI, Number 6   ARTICLE Culture & Barbarism
Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism

Terry Eagleton

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew?

Can one simply put it down to falling towers and fanatical Islamists? I don’t really think we can. Certainly the New Atheists’ disdain for religion did not sprout from the ruins of the World Trade Center. While some of the debate took its cue from there, 9/11 was not really about religion, any more than the thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland was over papal infallibility. In fact, radical Islam generally understands exceedingly little about its own religious faith, and there is good evidence to suggest that its actions are, for the most part, politically driven.

That does not mean these actions have no religious impact or significance. Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so. The West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded “metaphysical” foe for whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problem at all-and this at just the point when a Western civilization in the throes of late modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can. In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.

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Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic. It looks particularly flaccid when its paucity of belief runs up against an excess of the stuff-not only abroad, but domestically too, in the form of various homegrown fundamentalisms. Modern market societies tend to be secular, relativist, pragmatic, and materialistic, qualities that undermine the metaphysical values on which political authority in part depends. And yet capitalism cannot easily dispense with those metaphysical values, even though it has difficulty taking them seriously. (As President Dwight Eisenhower once announced, channeling Groucho Marx, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief-and I don’t care what it is.”) Religious faith in this view is both vital and vacuous. God is ritually invoked on American political platforms, but it would not do to raise him in a committee meeting of the World Bank. In the United States, ideologues of the religious Right, aware of the market’s tendency to oust metaphysics, sought to put those values back in place. Thus does postmodern relativism breed a redneck fundamentalism; those who believe very little rub shoulders with those ready to believe almost anything. With the advent of Islamist terrorism, these contradictions have been dramatically sharpened. It is now more than ever necessary that the people should believe, even as the Western way of life deprives them of much incentive for doing so.

Assured since the fall of the Soviet bloc that it could proceed with impunity to pursue its own global interests, the West overreached itself. Just when ideologies in general seemed to have packed up for good, the United States put them back on the agenda in the form of a peculiarly poisonous brand of neoconservatism. Like characters in some second-rate piece of science fiction, a small cabal of fanatical dogmatists occupied the White House and proceeded to execute their well-laid plans for world sovereignty. It was almost as bizarre as Scientologists taking over 10 Downing Street, or Da Vinci Code buffs patrolling the corridors of the Elysée Palace. The much-trumpeted Death of History, meaning that capitalism was now the only game in town, reflected the arrogance of the West’s project of global domination; and that aggressive project triggered a backlash in the form of radical Islam.

And so the very act of attempting to close history down has sprung it open again. Both at home and globally, economic liberalism rides roughshod over peoples and communities, and in the process triggers just the kind of violent social and cultural backlash that liberalism is least capable of handling. In this sense, too, terrorism highlights certain contradictions endemic to liberal capitalism. We have seen already that pluralistic liberal societies do not so much hold beliefs as believe that people should be allowed freely to hold beliefs. The summum bonum is to leave believers to get on with it unmolested. Such a purely formal or procedural approach to belief necessitates keeping entrenched faiths or identities at a certain ironic arm’s length.

Yet this value-liberal society’s long, unruly, eternally inconclusive argument-also brings vulnerability. A tight national consensus, desirable in the face of external attack, is hard to pull off in liberal democracies, and not least when they turn multicultural. Lukewarmness about belief is likely to prove a handicap when one is confronted with a full-bloodedly metaphysical enemy. The very pluralism you view as an index of your spiritual strength may have a debilitating effect on your political authority, especially against zealots who regard pluralism as a form of intellectual cowardice. The idea, touted in particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafés smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.

In the face of the social devastation wreaked by economic liberalism, some besieged groups can feel secure only by clinging to an exclusivist identity or unbending doctrine. And in fact, advanced capitalism has little alternative to offer them. The kind of automated, built-in consent it seeks from its citizens does not depend all that much on what they believe. As long as they get out of bed, roll into work, consume, pay their taxes, and refrain from beating up police officers, what goes on in their heads and hearts is mostly secondary. Advanced capitalism is not the kind of regime that exacts much spiritual commitment from its subjects. Indeed, zeal is more to be feared than encouraged. That is an advantage in “normal” times, since demanding too much belief from men and women can easily backfire. But it is much less a benefit in times of political tumult.

Economic liberalism has generated great tides of global migration, which within the West has given birth to so-called multiculturalism. At its least impressive, multiculturalism blandly embraces difference as such, without looking too closely into what one is differing over. It imagines that there is something inherently positive about having a host of different views on the same subject. Such facile pluralism tends to numb the habit of vigorously contesting other people’s beliefs-of calling them arrant nonsense or unmitigated garbage, for example. This is not the best training ground for taking on people whose beliefs can cave in skulls. One of the more agreeable aspects of Christopher Hitchens’s polemic against religion, God Is Not Great, is its author’s ready willingness to declare that he thinks religion poisonous and disgusting. Perhaps he finds it mildly embarrassing in his new, post-Marxist persona that “Religion is poison” was the slogan under which Mao launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet. But he is right to stick to his guns even so. Beliefs are not to be respected just because they are beliefs. Societies in which any kind of abrasive criticism constitutes “abuse” clearly have a problem.

That problem encompasses a contradictory fact: the more capitalism flourishes on a global scale, the more multiculturalism threatens to loosen the hold of the nation-state over its subjects. Culture, after all, is what helps power grow roots, interweaving it with our lived experience and thus tightening its grip on us. A power which has to sink roots in many diverse cultures simultaneously is at a signal disadvantage. A British defense think tank recently published a report arguing that a “misplaced deference to multiculturalism” that fails “to lay down the line to immigrant communities” was weakening the fight against political extremists. The problem, the report warned, was one of social fragmentation in a multicultural nation increasingly divided over its history, identity, aims, and values. When it came to the fight against terrorism, the nation’s liberal values, in short, were undermining themselves.

Multiculturalism threatens the existing order not only because it can create a breeding ground for terrorists, but because the political state depends on a reasonably tight cultural consensus. British prime ministers believe in a common culture-but what they mean is that everyone should share their own beliefs so that they won’t end up bombing London Underground stations. The truth, however, is that no cultural belief is ever extended to sizable groups of newcomers without being transformed in the process. This is what a simpleminded philosophy of “integration” fails to recognize. There is no assumption in the White House, Downing Street, or the Elysée Palace that one’s own beliefs might be challenged or changed in the act of being extended to others. A common culture in this view incorporates outsiders into an already established, unquestionable framework of values, leaving them free to practice whichever of their quaint customs pose no threat. Such a policy appropriates newcomers in one sense, while ignoring them in another. It is at once too possessive and too hands-off. A common culture in a more radical sense of the term is not one in which everyone believes the same thing, but one in which everyone has equal status in cooperatively determining a way of life in common.

If this is to include those from cultural traditions that are currently marginal, then the culture we are likely to end up with will be very different from the one we have now. For one thing, it will be more diverse. A culture that results from the active participation of all its members is likely to be more mixed and uneven than a uniform culture that admits new members only on its own terms. In this sense, equality generates difference. It is not a question of mustering a diversity of cultures under the common umbrella of Britishness, but of putting that whole received identity into the melting pot and seeing what might emerge. If the British or American way of life really were to take on board the critique of materialism, hedonism, and individualism made by many devout Muslims, Western civilization would most certainly be altered for the good. This is a rather different vision from the kind of multiculturalism that leaves Muslims and others alone to do their own charmingly esoteric stuff, commending them from a safe distance.

Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side of civilization to the side of barbarism. He is no longer the short-haired, blue-blazered God of the West-well, perhaps he is in the United States, but not in Porto or Cardiff or Bologna. Instead, he is a wrathful, dark-skinned God who, if he did create John Locke and John Stuart Mill, has long since forgotten the fact. One can still speak of the clash between civilization and barbarism; but a more subtle form of the same dispute is to speak of a conflict between civilization and culture. Civilization in this dichotomy means the universal, autonomous, prosperous, individual, rationally speculative, self-doubting, and ironic; culture means the customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective, unironic, and a-rational. Culture signifies all those unreflective loyalties and allegiances for which men and women in extreme circumstances are prepared to kill. For the most part, the former colonizing nations are civilizations, while the former colonies are cultures.

Civilization is precious but fragile; culture is raw but potent. Civilizations kill to protect their material interests, whereas cultures kill to defend their identity. These are seeming opposites; yet the pressing reality of our age is that civilization can neither dispense with culture nor easily coexist with it. The more pragmatic and materialistic civilization becomes, the more culture is summoned to fulfill the emotional and psychological needs that it cannot handle-and the more, therefore, the two fall into mutual antagonism. What is meant to mediate universal values to particular times and places ends up turning aggressively against them. Culture is the repressed that returns with a vengeance. Because it is supposed to be more localized, immediate, spontaneous, and a-rational than civilization, it is the more aesthetic concept of the two. The kind of nationalism that seeks to affirm a native culture is always the most poetic kind of politics-the “invention of literary men,” as someone once remarked. You would not have put the great Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse on the sanitation committee.

Religion falls on both sides of this fence simultaneously, which is part of its formidable power. As civilization, religion is doctrine, institution, authority, metaphysical speculation, transcendent truth, choirs, and cathedrals. As culture, it is myth, ritual, savage irrationalism, spontaneous feeling, and the dark gods. Religion in the United States is by and large a civilizational matter, whereas in England it is largely a traditional way of life-more akin to high tea or clog dancing than to socialism or Darwinism-which it would be bad form to take too seriously (the highly English Dawkins is in this respect egregiously un-English). One couldn’t imagine the Queen’s chaplain asking you if you have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. As the Englishman remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up. Polls reveal that most of the English believe that religion has done more harm than good, an eminently reasonable opinion unlikely to be endorsed in Dallas.

What the champions of civilization rightly hold against culture is its tendency to substitute for rational debate. Just as in some traditionalist societies you can justify what you do on the grounds that your ancestors did it, so for some culturalists you can justify what you do because your culture does it. This seems benign if one is thinking of Iceland, the Azande, or the maritime community, but less so for Hell’s Angels, neofascists, or Scientologists. In his article, “Islam, Islamisms, and the West,” Aijaz Ahmad points out that culture has come in some quarters to mean that one is how one is because of who one is-a doctrine shared by racism. An appeal to culture becomes a way of absolving us to some extent from moral responsibility as well as from rational argument. Just as it is part of their way of life to dig traps for tigers, so it is part of our way of life to manufacture cruise missiles. Postmodern thought is hostile to the idea of foundations; yet in postmodernism, culture becomes the new absolute, conceptual end-stop, the transcendental signifier. Culture is the point at which one’s spade hits rock bottom, the skin out of which one cannot leap, the horizon over which one is unable to peer. This is a strange case to launch at a point in history when Nature, a somewhat passé idea until our attention was recently drawn to its looming devastation, may be on the point of trumping human culture as a whole.

Yet there is a certain sacred resonance to the idea of culture. For several centuries now, after all, it has been proposed as the secular alternative to a failing religious faith. This is not a wholly ridiculous notion. Like religion, culture is a matter of ultimate values, intuitive certainties, hallowed traditions, assured identities, shared beliefs, symbolic action, and a sense of transcendence. It is culture, not religion, that for many men and women today forms the heart of a heartless world. This is true whether one has in mind the idea of culture as literature and the arts, or as a cherished way of life. Most aesthetic concepts are pieces of displaced theology, and the work of art, seen as mysterious, self-dependent, and self-moving, is an image of God for an agnostic age. Yet culture fails as an ersatz religion. Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired. And celebrating culture as a way of life is too parochial a version of redemption.

Some seek to reconcile culture and civilization (or as some might translate these terms, the Germans and the French) by claiming that the values of civilization, though universal, need a local habitation and a name-some sector of the globe that acts as the postal address of human civility itself. And this, of course, has been the West. In this view the West is a civilization, to be sure; but it also the very essence of the thing itself, rather as France is one nation among many, yet also the very essence of the intellect. For those to whom this argument seems supremacist, there exists what seems at first glance a rather less chauvinistic version of it. It is associated with the philosopher Richard Rorty (and, to a lesser extent, with the literary critic Stanley Fish).

Rorty’s kind of argument allows you to acknowledge that Western civilization is indeed a “culture” in the sense of being local and contingent-even as you claim its values are the ones to promote. This means behaving as though your values have all the force of universal ones, while at the same time insulating them from any thoroughgoing critique. They are immune to such critique because you do not claim any rational foundation for them; yours, after all, is just one culture among others. In a bold move, you can abandon a rational defense of your way of life for a culturalist one, even though the price of doing so is leaving it perilously ungrounded. “Culture” and “civilization” here felicitously coincide. The West is most certainly civilized; but since its civility descends to it from its contingent cultural history, there is no need to provide rational grounds for it. One thus wins for oneself the best of both worlds.

Reason alone can face down a barbarous irrationalism, but to do so it must draw upon forces and sources of faith which run deeper than itself, and which can therefore bear an unsettling resemblance to the very irrationalism it is seeking to repel. Such a situation confronted Europe during the Second World War. Would liberal humanism really prove adequate to defeat fascism, a movement which drew from powerfully irrational sources-or could fascism be vanquished only by an antagonist that cut as deep as it did, as socialism claimed to do? The question of reason and its opposite was a major theme of Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain. In this work, life and death, affirmation and negation, Eros and Thanatos, the sacred and the obscene, are all interwoven in the conflict between Settembrini, the liberal humanist, and the sinister Naphta, Jesuit, communist, and rebel. Naphta is a full-blooded modernist in satanic revolt against Settembrini’s spirit of liberal bourgeois modernity. An exponent of sacrifice, spiritual absolutism, religious zeal, and the cult of death, he draws his life from the archaic and bloodstained springs of culture, whereas the civilized Settembrini is a sunny-minded champion of reason, progress, liberal values, and the European mind.

There can be no doubt which character in The Magic Mountain our civilized New Atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins would find congenial, and which they would vilify. The novel itself, however, is a trifle more subtle in its judgments. The Settembrini who celebrates life is actually at death’s door, and the First World War during which the novel is set spells the ruin of his high nineteenth-century hopes. Naphta may be pathologically in love with death, but Settembrini’s buoyant humanism thrives on the repression of it. He cannot stomach the truth that to be human is, among other things, to be sick. Perversity and aberration are constitutive of the human condition, not just irrational deviations from it. It is significant in this respect that nobody in the clinic in which the novel’s action takes place ever seems to be cured.

What the novel’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, comes to recognize is a form of death-in-life which is the way of neither Naphta nor Settembrini. It involves affirming the human humbly, nonhubristically, in the knowledge of its frailty and mortality. This tragic humanism embraces the disruptiveness of death, as Settembrini does not; but, unlike Naphta, it refuses to turn death into a fetish. At the heart of Castorp’s moving utopian vision of love and comradeship in the novel’s great snow scene lurks the horrifying image of a child torn limb from limb, a token of the blood sacrifice that underpins civilization itself. Having been granted this epiphany, Hans will henceforth refuse to let death have mastery over his thoughts. It is love, not reason, he muses, which is stronger than death, and from that alone can flow the sweetness of civilization. Reason in itself is too abstract and impersonal a force to face down death. But such love, to be authentic, must live “always in silent recognition of the blood sacrifice.” One must honor beauty, idealism, and the hunger for progress, while confessing in Marxist or Nietzschean style how much blood and wretchedness lie at their root. Only by bowing to our mortality can we live fulfilled.

If culture can prove no adequate stand-in for religion, neither can it serve as a substitute for politics. The shift from modernity to postmodernity represents in part the belief that culture, not politics, holds center stage. Postmodernism is more perceptive about lifestyles than it is about material interests-better on identity than oil. As such it has an ironic affinity with radical Islam, which also holds that what is ultimately at stake are beliefs and values. I have argued elsewhere that Western postmodernism has some of its roots in the failure of revolutionary politics. In a similar way, Islamic fundamentalism is among other things a virulent response to the defeat of the Muslim Left-a defeat in which the West has actively conspired. In some quarters, the language of religion is replacing the discourse of politics.

If politics has failed to unite the wretched of the earth to transform their condition, we can be sure that culture will not accomplish the task in its stead. Culture, for one thing, is too much a matter of affirming what you are or have been, rather than what you might become. What, then, of religion? To be sure, Christendom once saw itself as a unity of culture and civilization; and if religion has proved far and away the most powerful, tenacious, universal symbolic form humanity has yet to come up with, it is partly on this account. What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most absolute and universal of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? What other way of life has brought the most rarefied of ideas and the most palpable of human realities into such intimate relationship? Religious faith has established a hotline from personal interiority to transcendent authority-an achievement upon which the advocates of culture can only gaze with envy. Yet religion is as powerless as culture to emancipate the dispossessed. For the most part, it has not the slightest interest in doing so.

With the advent of modernity, culture and civilization were progressively riven, and faith driven increasingly into the private domain, or into the realm of everyday culture, as political sovereignty passed into the hands of the secular state. Along with the other two symbolic domains of art and sexuality, religion was unhooked to some extent from secular power; and the upshot of this privatization for all three symbolic forms was notably double-edged. On the one hand, they could act as precious sources of alternative value, and thus of political critique; on the other hand, their isolation from the public world caused them to become increasingly pathologized.

The prevailing global system, then, today faces an unwelcome choice. Either it trusts its native pragmatism in the face of its enemy’s absolutism, or it falls back on metaphysical values of its own-values that are looking increasingly tarnished and implausible. Does the West need to go full-bloodedly metaphysical to save itself? And if it does, can it do so without inflicting too much damage on its liberal, secular values, thus ensuring there is still something worth protecting from its illiberal opponents?

If Marxism once held out a promise of reconciling culture and civilization, it is partly because its founder was both a Romantic humanist and an heir of Enlightenment rationalism. Marxism is about culture and civilization together-sensuous particularity and universality, worker and citizen of the world, local allegiances and international solidarity, the free self-realization of flesh-and-blood individuals and a global cooperative commonwealth of them. But Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political rebuff; and one of the places to which those radical impulses have migrated is-of all things-theology. In theology nowadays, one can find some of the most informed and animated discussions of Deleuze and Badiou, Foucault and feminism, Marx and Heidegger. That is not entirely surprising, since theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world-one whose subject is nothing less than the nature and transcendental destiny of humanity itself. These are not issues easily raised in analytic philosophy or political science. Theology’s remoteness from pragmatic questions is an advantage in this respect.

We find ourselves, then, in a most curious situation. In a world in which theology is increasingly part of the problem, it is also fostering the kind of critical reflection which might contribute to some of the answers. There are lessons that the secular Left can learn from religion, for all its atrocities and absurdities; and the Left is not so flush with ideas that it can afford to look such a gift horse in the mouth. But will either side listen to the other at present? Will Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins read this and experience an epiphany that puts the road to Damascus in the shade? To use two theological terms by way of response: not a hope in hell. Positions are too entrenched to permit such a dialogue. Mutual understanding cannot happen just anywhere, as some liberals tend to suppose. It requires its material conditions. And it seems unlikely these will emerge as long as the so-called war on terror continues to run its course.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.
作者: Robot    时间: 2009-6-19 00:51

[光明译丛]

文化与野蛮:恐怖主义时代的形而上学

光明网-光明观察 刊发时间:2009-05-31 11:45:33

特里·伊格尔顿 著 吴万伟 译


  为什么最不可能谈论上帝的人(包括我自己在内)突然对上帝感兴趣了呢?谁能想到神学在21世纪技术时代会再次出现?这几乎和索罗亚斯德教/拜火教(Zoroastrianism)的大规模复兴一样让人吃惊。我们当地书店突然冒出来一个贴
着“无神论”标签的区域,摆放的是反上帝的宣言,克里斯托弗·希金斯(Christopher Hitchens)、理查德·道金斯(Richard Dawkins)等人甚至可能在思考标志为“对温和浸礼会派的天生怀疑”的另一个问题。就在我们信心十足地走向后神学、后形而上学、甚至后历史学的时代,为什么上帝问题又重新冒出来了呢?

  能简单地把它归咎为双子塔的倒塌和和狂热的伊斯兰分子吗?我认为不能这么做。当然,新无神论者对宗教的蔑视并非从世界贸易中心的废墟中产生的。尽管有些辩论从中找到了线索,但9-11袭击实际上并非宗教问题,正如北爱尔兰三十年之久的冲突并不是关于“教皇永远无错”(papal infallibility)的问题一样。实际上,极端伊斯兰一般来说对自己的宗教信仰了解很少,有很多证据证明其行动在很大程度上是出于政治动机。

  这并不是说这些行动没有宗教影响或者意义。伊斯兰极端主义遭遇西方文明伴随着西方自身的矛盾,一方面需要信仰,另一方面又越来越失去信仰的能力。现在西方就站在精神旺盛的“形而上学”敌人面前,四目相对。人家的绝对真理和基础根本不是问题,这使得处于现代后期或者后现代动荡时期的西方文明不得不躲避,尽可能体面地相信少点。按后尼采的精神,西方的表现是用讲究实惠的物质主义、政治上的实用主义、道德和文化上的相对主义和哲学上的怀疑主义的非神圣大杂烩竭力破坏自己从前的形而上学基础。可以说,所有这些是你为富足生活所付出的代价。

  高级资本主义阶段从本质上说属于不可知论。用物质丰裕来对抗信仰缺乏使它看起来软弱无力,不仅在国外而且在国内表现为形形色色的本土极端主义形式。现代市场社会倾向于追求物质享受的世俗生活,相信相对主义和实用主义,破坏形而上学价值的品质,而在过去,政治权威就是建立在这些东西上面的。不过,资本主义不能轻易地摆脱这些形而上学价值,虽然在严肃接受它们时存在困难。(艾森豪威尔总统曾经模仿喜剧演员葛洛丘·马克思(Groucho Marx)的话宣称“我们的政府如果不是建立在深深感受到的宗教信仰基础上就没有意义,虽然我不在乎这宗教信仰具体是什么)。这个意义上的宗教信仰即是重要的又是空虚的。从仪式上说,在美国政治舞台上总提到上帝,但在世界银行委员会会议上提到上帝就不起作用。在美国,宗教右派的意识形态宣传家们很清楚市场驱逐形而上学的倾向,企图把价值观找回来。因此后现代相对主义产生了红脖子极端主义;那些本来很少有信仰的人与那些愿意相信几乎任何事情的人厮混在一起。因为伊斯兰恐怖主义的出现,这些矛盾对立迅速加剧。人们应该有信仰在当今就显得更为迫切,因为西方人的生活方式让他们失去了信仰的动机。

  因为苏联阵营的垮台,西方相信自己可以不受惩罚地追求自身的全球利益,因而到处插手。就在笼统的意识形态似乎永远束之高阁的时候,美国用特别有危害的新保守主义的牌子把它重新放在议程上。像有些二流科幻小说中的人物一样,一小撮狂热的教条主义者占据了白宫,开始推行精心设计的世界霸权计划。几乎同样怪异的是科学论者占据唐宁街十号,达芬奇密码爱好者巡逻在爱丽舍宫的走廊上。被大肆渲染的历史终结的意思是资本主义现在是城中唯一的游戏,这反映了西方全球霸权工程的傲慢。这咄咄逼人的工程催生了事与愿违的后果,极端伊斯兰主义。

  所以试图封闭历史的行动本身又把历史打开了。无论是在国内还是在国际上,经济自由主义对人民和社会横行霸道,在此过程中激发了激烈的社会和文化反抗,但自由主义至少还有能力对付。在这个意义上,恐怖主义突出显示了自由资本主义普遍存在的矛盾。我们已经看到多元化自由社会并非相信人们应该被允许信仰自己相信的东西。至高的善(summum bonum)是让信仰者不受干扰地信仰。具有讽刺意味的是,这种对信仰的纯形式程序的途径使得人们有必要与根深蒂固的信仰或者身份认同保持一定距离。

  但这种价值观自由的社会的长期、难控制、外在非决定性的论证也造成了脆弱性的后果。全民一致的共识在面对外来攻击时,非常宝贵,但在自由民主社会很难成功,在转向多元文化时,就更难奏效了。在面对热血沸腾的形而上学敌人时,你对信仰的冷漠很可能是个缺陷。你看作精神优势的多元主义本身可能削弱你的政治权威,尤其是在反对那些把多元主义看作思想懦夫的狂热分子时。有些美国人特别喜欢兜售伊斯兰激进分子羡慕西方自由的观点,这种荒唐看法简直就像建议他们悄悄地渴望坐在酒吧里吸食大麻和阅读法国哲学家吉尔·德勒兹(Gilles Deleuze)一样。

  在经济自由主义造成的社会破坏面前,某些陷入困境的群体只有牢牢抓住排外性身份认同或者不妥协的主张才能觉得安全。实际上,高级资本主义能为他们提供的替代品很少。它从公民中寻找的这种自动的、内在的一致并不依赖其信仰。只要他们起床、上班、消费、交税、克制自己不痛打警察,头脑中或者心中想些什么是次要问题。高级自由主义不是要求民众严格接受很多精神承诺的政权。实际上,热情是让人害怕而不是受到鼓励的东西。在“正常”时期,这是优势,因为要求人们信仰太多很容易造成相反效果。但在政治动荡时期,它的优势就少多了。

  经济自由主义已经产生了一拨又一拨的移民潮,在西方诞生了所谓的多元文化主义。在其最不起眼的意义上,多元文化主义温和地拥抱差别,并不仔细考察具体差别是什么。它想象对同一事务拥有不同观点似乎天生就是积极的。这种轻率的多元主义倾向于弱化激烈驳斥其他人信仰的习惯,不大可能说别人一派胡言或者是十足的屁话。这不是最好的训练,对那些顽固相信某些观念的人来说尤其是个挑战。希金斯的反宗教著作《上帝并不伟大》的比较容易接受的地方是作者愿意宣称他认为宗教是有害的和恶心的。或许他发现在他新的、后马克思主义性格中“宗教是鸦片”有点尴尬,因为这是毛在发动攻击西藏人和西藏文化时使用的口号。但是在坚持抓住自己的枪时他是正确的。信仰不能仅仅因为是信仰就值得尊重。一个社会如果容不得任何批评,稍一批评就翻脸,就被认为是“虐待”,那它显然是有问题的。

  这问题包含一个矛盾的事实:资本主义在全球范围内越繁荣,多元文化主义就越威胁到民族国家对国民的控制。毕竟,文化是帮助权力生根的东西,文化和我们的生活经验密切相关,因而对我们的控制更紧密。一个需要在众多不同文化中同时生根的权力显然处于明显的劣势。英国国防思想库最近发表了一份报告说没有能“在移民社区划一条线”,“对多元文化主义的错误尊重”削弱了反对政治极端分子的斗争。报告警告说,这是多元文化国家越来越根据历史、身份认同、目标和价值分裂造成的社会碎片化的一个表现。简单地说,在反对恐怖主义时,国家的自由价值观起到了破坏性作用。

  多元文化主义威胁现有秩序不仅因为它能产生培养恐怖分子的土壤,而且因为政治国家依靠可靠的、强大的文化共识。英国首相们相信共同的文化,但他们的意思是人人都应该分享其信仰,这样就不会最终向伦敦地铁站放炸弹了。但真实的情况是任何一种文化信仰在推广到众多新来者群体时都要经过一个转化过程。这就是鼓吹“融合”的头脑简单的哲学没有能认识到的东西。白宫、唐宁街、爱丽舍宫没有一个假设信仰在推广到其他人时可能遭遇挑战或者改变。该观点认为共同文化把外来者纳入到早已建立的不受质疑的价值观框架内,让他们自由实践奇特的习俗,不会对共同文化造成任何威胁。这种政策在一个意义上改造了新来者,但在另一个意义上是忽略了他们,因为它既过分控制又撒手不管。在更激进的意义上,共同文化的术语不是人人都相信同一件事的文化,而是在这样的文化中,在共同决定共同生活方式时,人人都有平等地位。

  如果这包括来自现在处于边缘文化传统的人,那么我们最后得到的文化将和现在拥有的文化有很大差别。一方面,它将多样化。和按自己的标准接收新成员的单一文化相比,一个从所有成员积极参加中诞生的文化很可能更加具有混合性,更加不平衡。在此意义上,平等产生差别。不是在英国性的大框架下集合起来的文化多样性问题而是把整体接受的身份认同放在熔炉里看看最后产生出什么来。如果英国或者美国生活方式真的意味着接受许多虔诚的穆斯林做出的物质主义、享乐主义、个人主义的批评,西方文明很可能被永久性地改变。这与让穆斯林等人自己决定吸引他们的神秘内容,从安全的距离称赞的多元文化主义完全不同。

  我们时代发生的部分情况是上帝从文明一边转向了野蛮一边。他已经不再是短头发的、蓝色鲜艳服装的西方上帝,或许他在美国,但肯定不在波多黎各或者加的夫(Cardiff)或者波洛尼亚(Bologna)。相反,他是满心愤怒的、黑皮肤的上帝,如果他确实创造了约翰·洛克和约翰·斯图亚特·穆勒,也早就忘记这个事实了。人们仍然谈到文明和野蛮的冲突,但这冲突的更微妙形式是谈到文明和文化的冲突。在这两元对立中,文明意味着普遍的、自主的、繁荣的、个人的、理性预测的、自我怀疑的、反讽的;文化意味着习惯的、集体的、激情的、自发的、不加思考的、不会讽刺的、非理性的。文化放大了所有那些不加思考的忠诚和同盟,人们在极端情况下愿意去杀人。多数情况下,前殖民国家是文明,而前殖民地是文化。

  文明是宝贵的但很脆弱;文化是粗糙的,但很强大。文明杀人是为了保护自己的物质利益,而文化杀人是捍卫自己的身份认同。这些似乎是对立的,但我们时代让人担忧的现实是文明既不能脱离文化而存在也不能与文化共存。文明变得越实用主义和物质主义,文化就越被要求满足它无法对付的感情和心理需要,因此两者也就越来越相互对立。本来打算协调普世价值和特定时间和地点的东西结果变得咄咄逼人地反对它们。受到压抑的文化以报复性的姿态杀回来了。因为文化被认为比文明地方色彩更浓、更直接、更有自发性和非理性特征、更容易成为有美学意义的概念。试图赞美本土文化的民族主义总是最有诗意的政治,正如有人指出的“文人的发明”。你本不应该让伟大的爱尔兰民族主义者帕德里克·皮尔斯(Padraic Pearse)进入卫生委员会的。

  宗教同时落在这个篱笆的两边,这部分解释了它让人畏惧的力量。作为文明,宗教是信念、机构、权威、形而上学思考、超验的真理、唱诗班和大教堂。作为文化,它是神话、仪式、原始非理性主义、自发的情感、黑暗的神。在美国宗教基本上属于文明,而在英国,宗教基本上是传统生活方式,更类似黄昏茶点或踢踏舞而不是社会主义或者达尔文理论,过分认真对待是不好的形式(在这点上,英国味很浓的道金斯异乎寻常地具有非英国色彩)。人们无法想象女王的牧师问你是否在羊血里洗澡了。正如英国人所说,当宗教开始干涉你的日常生活时,就到了放弃宗教的时候了。民意调查显示大部分英国人相信宗教弊大于利,类似的民意调查结果不可能在达拉斯得到民众的认可。

  文明鼓吹者反对文化的正确观点是用理性辩论替代争吵的倾向。正如在有些传统社会,你能够根据祖先惯例来为你做的事情辩护,对有些文化主义者来说,你能证明你做的是对的,只要你的文化一直是这样的。如果人们想到的是冰岛、非洲阿尚德族人(Azande)或者海洋社会,这似乎是有利的,但对电影《地狱天使》来说, 新法西斯主义者或者科学论教派就未必如此了。在“伊斯兰、伊斯兰主义和西方”一文中,印度学者埃加兹·阿赫曼德(Aijaz Ahmad)指出文化在有些方面意味着一个人的出身决定了他是什么样的人,这也就是种族主义者的观念。向文化求助在某种程度上让我们摆脱了道德责任或者理性辩论的麻烦。正如挖捕老虎的陷阱是生活方式的一部分一样,生产巡航导弹也是生活方式的一部分。后现代思想讨厌思想基础的观点,但在后现代主义,文化变成了新的绝对的概念终点站,是超验的能指。文化是人的铲子碰到的石头底,人们无法跳出它的皮,无法越过它看到地平线。这是一个说明历史时刻的特殊例子,一个有点过时的观念“自然”可能战胜整体的人类文化,而人们的注意力近来一直集中在自然可能遭到的破坏上。

  但是,存在一种对文化观点的神圣化回应。毕竟几个世纪来,它一直被当作宗教信仰失败的世俗替代品。这并并非完全荒谬的观点。文化像宗教一样最终是价值观、本能确定性、神圣的传统、确认的身份认同、共同的信仰、象征性行为、超验意识等问题。在当今很多人看来冷酷无情的世界的核心是文化而不是宗教。这是真实的,不管人们心里想的文化是文学艺术还是珍视的生活方式。多数美学概念是移位的神学碎片,被看作神秘的、依赖自我的、自我移动的艺术品是不可知论者时代的上帝形象。但文化作为人造的宗教失败了,艺术品不能挽救我们,只能让我们对需要修补的东西更加敏感。庆祝作为生活方式的文化是目光过于狭隘的救赎版本。

  有人试图调和文化和文明的矛盾(或者正如有些德国人和法国人翻译的这些术语那样),如宣称文明的价值虽然是普遍性的但需要在一个地方扎根,需要一个名称作为人类文明本身的邮寄地址,它当然一直是西方。按照这个观点,西方当然是一种文明,但它也是文明本身。或者法国是众多国家中的一个,但也是思想智慧本身。对那些认为这个观点是超级种族主义的人来说,存在咋一看不那么沙文主义的形式。它和哲学家·罗蒂(Richard Rorty)有关(也与文学批评家斯坦利·费希 (Stanley Fish)有关。

  罗蒂的观点让你承认西方文明在具有地方性和偶然性的意义上确实是一种“文化”,即使你宣称其价值观是人们推崇的价值观。这意味着行为方式上好象你的价值观具有普遍性力量,但与此同时让它们隔绝任何彻底的批评。它们免除这种批评是因为你没有宣称它们的任何理性基础,毕竟,你的文化不过是众多文化的一种而已。一个大胆的动作是,作为文化主义者你放弃为你的生活方式的理性辩护, 即使这么做的代价是让它处于危险的没有基础的境地。这里“文化”和“文明”贴切地碰巧结合。西方当然文明程度最高,但是因为它的文明是从偶然的文化历史演化而来,就没有必要提供其理性基础了。因此,人们为自己赢得了两个世界中最好的东西。

  单单理性能战胜野蛮的非理性主义,但这样做就必须动员力量和比它更深刻的信仰来源。它因此能够承受让人不安的与它竭力要消除的非理性主义的相似之处。这种处境在第二次世界大战时让欧洲遭遇过。自由派人道主义真的能证明足以战胜从强大的非理性源头吸取力量的法西斯主义?还是只能被对立的同样强大的社会主义运动来消灭?理性及其对立面的问题是托马斯·曼(Thomas Mann)的伟大小说《魔山》的主题。在这部作品中,生与死、肯定与否定、爱神与死神、神圣与邪恶都交织在两个人的冲突中,一个是自由派人道主义者塞特姆布里尼(Settembrini),另一个是阴谋家、共产主义者、叛乱分子、邪恶的纳夫塔(Naphta)。纳夫塔是热血沸腾的人,反对塞特姆布里尼的自由派资产阶级现代性的精神,是牺牲、精神绝对主义、宗教狂热、死亡崇拜的代表,他从文化的古老和沾染血迹的源头汲取生命,而文明的塞特姆布里尼是思想阳光的人,支持理性、进步、自由价值和欧洲人思想。

  毫无疑问,我们文明的新无神论者如希金斯和道金斯会发现《魔山》中的哪个人物意气相投,哪个人物他们想攻击谴责。但是小说本身在做出判断的时候非常微妙。赞美生活的塞特姆布里尼实际上位于死亡门口,作为小说背景的第一次世界大战意味着他对19世纪希望的破灭。纳夫塔或许病态地热爱死亡,但是塞特姆布里尼的高涨的人道主义是在压制它的基础上繁荣的。他不能忍受这个真理,要成为人就要生病,当然还有其他东西。反常和脱离常规是人类条件的组成部分,不仅是非理性的偏离。在这方面非常重要的是作为小说中活动背景的诊所中的人似乎没有得到治疗。

  小说的主人公汉斯·卡斯拖普(Hans Castorp)逐渐认识到的东西是来自死亡的生命,即不是纳夫塔也不是塞特姆布里尼的方式。这涉及确认人的卑微、谦恭、认识到自己的脆弱性和必死性。这种悲剧性人道主义拥抱死亡的中断和破坏,塞特姆布里尼不这样;但是和纳夫塔不同,它拒绝把死亡变成崇拜。在小说的大雪场面中卡斯拖普的爱和同志情谊的动人场面的核心潜藏着孩子被一根根肋骨折断的让人恐怖的形象,这是支撑文明的血腥牺牲的象征。有了这个顿悟,汉斯从此拒绝让死亡占领他的思想。他认识到是爱而不是理性比死亡更强大,从这个来源流出文明的甜蜜。理性本身太抽象和太非人化的力量,无法面对死亡。但更真实的是,这种爱必须“永远悄悄地承认流血牺牲”的生活。人必须尊重美、理想主义、渴望进步、同时以马克思主义或者尼采式地承认在它们的根源存在着多少鲜血和苦难。只有屈服于必死性,我们才能满意的生活。

  如果文化证明不足以代替宗教,它同样也不能充当政治的替代品。从现代性到后现代性的转变部分表达了文化而不是政治占据中心舞台的信念。后现代主义更多是关于生活方式的而不关于物质利益的观念,更多是关于身份认同的而不是关于石油的观念。具有讽刺意味的是,在这点上它和极端伊斯兰契合,极端伊斯兰也认为最终重要的是信念和价值。我曾在别处认为西方后现代主义的部分根源是革命政治的失败。同样的,伊斯兰极端主义是对于穆斯林左派失败的有毒反应,是西方积极谋划的失败。在某些地方,宗教语言代替了政治文本。

  如果政治没有能把世界上的受苦人团结起来改变他们的状况,我们可以肯定文化同样不能完成这个任务。一方面,文化更多是认可你的现状和历史,而不是未来会如何。那么宗教如何呢?当然,基督教世界曾经把自己看作文化和文明的结合体,如果宗教无疑地证明是人类创造的最强大、最顽强、最普遍的象征形式,部分就因为它。其他什么象征形式能够在最绝对的和普遍的真理和千百万男女日常的实践之间形成如此直接的联系呢?什么其他生活方式把最深奥的观念和人类现实的最容易觉察的内容带进这么亲密的关系中呢?宗教信仰在个人内省和形而上学权威之间建立起热线联系,这是文化鼓吹者只能羡慕地看着的巨大成就。但宗教和文化一样在解放被剥夺者时无能为力。在很多时候,它根本没有丁点儿的兴趣要这么做。

  随着现代性的到来,文化和文明越来越多地分开,信仰被越来越多地驱赶到私人领域或进入日常文化中,因为政治主权传递到了世俗国家手中。连同艺术和性另外两个象征领域,宗教在某种程度上和世俗权力脱钩,这三种象征形式的私有化的结局是著名的双刃剑。一方面,它们可能充当替代性价值的宝贵来源,因此是对政治的批评,另一方面,它们和公共世界的孤立造成越来越多的病态。

  当时流行的全球体制如今成为不受欢迎的选择。要么在面对敌人的绝对主义时信任本土的实用主义,要么回到自己越来越失去光泽的和难以叫人相信的价值观的形而上学价值基础上。西方需要精力旺盛的形而上学来挽救自身吗?如果这样做,它能够在实现这个目标时不同时给其自由的、世俗的价值观带来太多伤害,因而确保仍然有值得保护免受非自由敌人侵害的东西吗?

  如果马克思主义曾经指出了调解文化和文明的前景,那部分是因为其创立人既是浪漫主义人道主义者又是启蒙理性主义者的继承者。马克思主义同时讨论文化和文明-感官方面的特殊性和普遍性、世界的工人和公民、地方同盟和国际团结、有血有肉的个人的自由的自我实现以及全球合作共同体的诞生。但是马克思主义在我们时代受到让人吃惊的政治冷遇。这些激进的冲动转移地方之一是-神学。在如今的神学中,人们能发现关于德勒兹和阿兰·巴迪乌(Badiou)、福柯和女权主义、马克思和海德格尔的最深刻、最有活力的讨论。这并不是完全让人吃惊的,因为神学仍然是越来越专业化的世界野心最大的理论探索领域之一,不管它的许多真正主张是多么让人难以相信,它的研究课题就是自然和人类本身的形而上学命运。这些是分析哲学或者政治学不大容易提出的问题。在这方面,神学远离实用问题反而成为一种优势。

  因此,我们发现自己来到非常让人好奇的景况中。在神学越来越成为问题的一部分的世界里,也形成一种批评性的反思,这可能有助于找到某些答案。世俗左派可以从宗教中吸取教训,尽管它有种种罪恶和荒谬。左派并不拥有丰裕的观点,能够贡献出来对礼物吹毛求疵。但是如今无论哪个方面愿意聆听吗?希金斯或者道金斯会读这些,经历使得通往大马士革的道路相形见绌的顿悟吗?使用两个神学术语作为回应:在地狱中没有希望。双方的立场过于根深蒂固,根本不允许两者之间的对话。正如有些自由派认为的那样,相互理解在任何地方都不能发生,它需要物质条件。只要所谓的反恐战争继续进行,这种对话就不可能出现。

  希金斯、道金斯和像我这样的人的区别最终在于自由派人道主义和悲剧人道主义的差别。有人认为如果我们能消除神话和迷信等有度遗产,我们就能获得自由。在我看来这样的希望本身就是神话,虽然是可精神可佳的神话。悲剧人道主义和自由派人道主义一样希望人类的自由繁荣,但是认为实现这个目标只能通过遭遇最坏的结果。对人性最终值得拥有的唯一的确认是像后宗教改革的幻灭的弥尔顿那样认真地质疑人性最开始到底值得不值得拯救,理解斯威夫特的巨人国国王,认为人类是可憎的害虫。悲剧人道主义不管是社会主义者、基督徒、还是心理分析师都相信只有通过自我放逐的过程和激进的重新制造,才能重生。谁也不能保证将来会诞生这样变了形的人物。但是如果自由派教条主义者、空谈理论的进步的摇旗呐喊者和伊斯兰恐惧症知识分子不再挡道的时候,它可能会来的早一点。

  译自:Culture & Barbarism Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism Terry Eagleton

  http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2488




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