Or, writing about things that happen in the world can be a way to show that abstract ideas actually do help us understand the world. To do this, I would find an example in the world that helps me explain an idea. Often, this method uses popular culture, such as movies. This is what is usually going on when people talk about "philosophy in movies." Movies, as I have stated, rarely get deeply philosophical. They just present situations which are readily available for use in explaining other ideas. Think The Matrix and Plato's Cave. Movies are capable of communicating philosophical ideas for sure, either as a reflection of the various political or social ideas of the people who made them, or even to intentionally make certain points. And they can have educational value. However, in general, the more effective they are at communicating philosophy inversely reflects how entertaining they are. There are exceptions. The ethical and aesthetic value of Bergman's Wild Strawberries is a pleasure. But "bleak" is generally the way I would describe most "serious" movies, at least those made today. Philosophy helps us make sense of the world (or see that the world does not make sense, either way, philosophy helps us clarify what is true), and movies can certainly do the same. But while we definitely need to see the world, we also have a need for leisure. To take a little time, and laugh.
There is another way to refer to stuff in the world in a blog like this. Sometimes, you don't use things that are relevant in order to make a point. Sometimes, you need to actually make sense of stuff that happens. So, while it may seem that I am breaking my own rules, which I would do without hesitation should I ever want to, I am not. I am writing, this week, about something that happened, something that got lots of attention, because it actually interests me. Besides, by the time I am done explaining my take on this, it won't really have the appeal that made it famous anyway.
Now, to stop beating around the bush and finally get to my point, I am going to write about what has become know as Fox News' most embarrassing interview ever.
On the surface, and pretty much everything in the interview is right on the surface, this is a pretty basic case of Islamophobia. A Fox News reporter openly criticizes a scholar for writing about Christianity when he is not a Christian. Why? Because she cannot imagine the possibility that a Muslim could write about Jesus without making value judgments about him. Or, to put it another way, that he could not write about Christianity in any way other than the way she is herself commenting on Islam. The reporter, Lauren Green, received a fair amount of criticism for this, some of it was about hypocrisy. However, I don't agree with that particular criticism. To some, she may appear a hypocrite because she assumes it is fair for her to comment on Islam, but not a Mulsim on Christianity. But, from a different point of view, the scholar, Reza Aslan is the hypocrite because he doesn't do what Green did, openly reject every religion other than his own.
Here is what I find worthwhile to point out about this whole situation. It reveals what we lose when we don't know enough about philosophy. I am not kidding. The problem, other than the obvious problem with high-minded ignorance, with this whole situation is that neither side had clearly expressed what it is each is talking about. This is a problem with journalism as a whole. Journalists don't seem to know how to comment on religion in a way that separates value judgment and the evaluation of truth claims. And while that isn't exactly the issue here, it was each time Christopher Hitchens was a part of the conversation.
To be fair, this is what Aslan almost does when he relies on his educational background. To many, when he refers to his degrees, he is making an appeal to his own authority in order to support his argument. And that is part of what was going on. To me, a person who has an advanced degree in a similar field who has read many of books cited in Aslan's work, something else comes across. Green asks Aslan how it is possible, as a Muslim, to write about Christianity. He says it is what he does. All I hear him saying is that he can write about Christianity, because he has done the study necessary to be able to. It is like asking a runner how it is possible to run a mile in six minutes. Because training enables him to do so. Aslan is basically saying that Christianity is something someone can learn about, not just something for someone to believe. If you know any conservative Christians, you can easily imagine what their response to this would be.
And this is where it gets interesting to me. As a seminary student, I too had to study and write about people whose beliefs were different from my own. Namely, medieval Christians who interpreted the Bible allegorically, something totally different from the historical method I was learning. At first, I found this very difficult, because I was careful to avoid, wait for it, value judgments. How could I comment on someone who's point of view was so different from my own in any way other that derogatory or dismissive? To be fair (to myself this time), I was studying ethics and when you try to remove value assessments from ethics, often you are left with the observation that someone just takes this or that to be very important. Durkheim basically thought that. For a guy who mentions morality so often, he basically accepts a form or realism as a theory for morals. "If it is to live there is not merely need of a satisfactory moral conformity, but also there is a minimum of logical conformity beyond which it cannot safely go. For this reason it uses all its authority upon its members to forestall such dissidences. Does a mind ostensibly free itself from these forms of thought? It is no longer considered a human mind in the full sense of the word, and is treated accordingly." (Here is the source of that quote) But then again, I suppose realists often make appeals to morality, even though they have a very different idea of what morality is than the people they make these appeals to. Anyway, I am getting off track here. What I was getting at is, there was a time when I, confronted with the task of commenting on people who had different commitments than my own, I, not too unlike Green, found it difficult to understand what intellectual justification I could have for doing so.
Perhaps it was my conservative upbringing that made this difficult for me. When I asked a noted historian, one who assigned the books I mentioned earlier, those that are relative to Alsan's work, told me, when I asked about methodology and how I could comment on people who had different commitments than me, that I just could. Then she made me doubt everything I thought I knew about myself. But I don't want to get into that.
OK, so, long story short, it is possible to make comments on other cultures, other people. Philosophy helps us do that. In my case, it was the philosophical, theory laden anthropology of Clifford Geertz, who in "Thick Description" explained that we need not to have the self-understanding that a member of another culture has in order to say anything about it, we only need to be able to successfully imitate that understanding. If you want me to get into this, I will. I wrote my Master's thesis on it. But, getting into my thesis in this post would be one too many personal rules broken.
Back to the Fox News interview. When Aslan's ability to actually comment on Christianity is accepted, by carefully explaining the methodology that enables him to do so (in his case, historical theory), the interview boils down, as it always does on Fox, to ideology. Green's conservatism says that a faith commitment automatically rejects any other commitment. Aslan's academic ideology says that such commitments can either be suspended in order to engage a public debate, or that they do not interfere with other commitments in a public space created on liberal ideas like the freedom of religion. A conservative like Green can enter such a space but still believe that public spaces should be defined not by liberal freedoms, but by a cultural heritage that includes religion. And that is really what is going on in the interview.
Green believed she was making a basic observation about the nature of religious commentary. Aslan was doing the same. What they disagreed on was not the ability of a Mulsim to talk about Jesus. They disagreed on the basic place of religion in society. It was philosophy that helped me understand that.
And, to give the conservatives a little credit, academics can get a bit mushy about these things too. Joseph Campbell, who gets way too much love from religion students, could blithely dismiss eastern ways of thinking as primitive and unevolved because they don't embrace western ideas of self. But, then again, he didn't have as many degrees as Aslan, and he didn't study philosophy.
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