Parasites, Religious and Secular
Steven Menashi :: 7/05/2007

Daniel's insistence here that Christopher Hitchens couldn't possibly "discern between the good, non-religious bits of Dostoevsky and the evil, theistic bits, as if he could saw Dostoevsky in two and retain the genius of the man's work" echoes Ross's argument yesterday that "For Harris as for Hitchens, all of religion is judged, and found wanting, according to the moral standards of a liberalism that is essentially parasitic on Christianity without wishing to admit it."

Of course, Christianity itself is parasitic on Judaism, but I doubt Ross would condemn his coreligionists for adopting the Ten Commandments while rejecting the kosher dietary laws or working on the Sabbath -- that is, for embracing Judaism's moral laws while discarding its religious laws, even though Judaism recognizes no such distinction between the moral and the legal. Rather, what Ross and other Christians say is that Christianity "completes" Judaism, and in fact improves upon it by "universalizing" its moral teaching -- separating its ethical insights from its particularistic concern with the Jewish people and liberating its spiritual truths from its ritualistic laws.

Well, it seems to me that liberalism can make much the same argument about its relationship to Christianity: Liberalism liberates Christianity's moral insights from all the supernatural mumbojumbo that weighs it down and prevents it from being fully realized. In fact, that's Hegel's argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Here's Kojeve on Hegel:

Consequently, to overcome the insufficiency of the Christian ideology, to become free from the absolute Master and the Beyond, to realize Freedom and to live in the World as a human being, autonomous and free -- all this is possible only on the condition that one accept the idea of death and, consequently, atheism. And the whole evolution of the Christian World is nothing but a progress toward the atheistic awareness of the essential finiteness of human existence. Only thus, only by "overcoming" Christian theology, will Man definitively cease to be a Slave and realize this idea of Freedom which, while it remained an abstract idea -- i.e., an ideal, engendered Christianity. This is what is effected in and by the French Revolution, which completes the evolution of the Christian World and inaugurates the third historical World, in which realized freedom will finally be conceived ... by philosophy.

So atheistic liberalism is, indeed, parasitic on Christianity -- because it "completes" Christianity. And "universalizes" it too.

I'm not endorsing this view so much as pointing out that it doesn't discredit an idea to say that it's parasitic on another, mutually exclusive idea. You can, in fact, discern between the non-religious bits and the theistic bits. You don't need to believe in the Furies to read and learn from Aeschylus. And Christopher Hitchens doesn't need to take communion to read Dostoevsky, either.