Commentary
As much as Stephen advocates for empiricism, I think Jordan’s advantage in this discussion, despite appearances, is that he’s more grounded in ordinary empirical reality. As smart as he is, as successful as he is, Jordan hasn’t lived as one of the elite, the powerful, or the great of Canadian society. He grew up in a small town, more rural environment, ended up at a good university working a fairly normal job, and he didn’t just become a professor; he also maintained a practice.
I think that’s the real key difference. Jordan didn’t just do research or spend his time writing books. He spent (or wasted, if you think his time could have been better spent) years wrestling with the worst, most intractable, complex problems of a broad selection of people. And you shouldn’t underestimate how that shaped and affected his approach and perspective. And he had children and raised a family, the most basic and common of human endeavors and experiences, a battleground of practical training (far more than mere theory) in applied psychology, law, morality, education, and politics. And he seems to have done a good job at those things and maintained a healthy long-term relationship with his wife and his kids. That’s a longer and more complex endeavor than the PhD he earned.
Stephen has done all sorts of amazing things, he’s had his own kinds of experiences, but they generally skew toward the social, intellectual, cultural, and economic elite. And he’s not had to spend a lot of time on the ground confronting the sorts of problems that beset ordinary humans at their most basic levels. That skews your view of humanity and what its problems are; what’s possible, what’s dangerous, what’s helpful, and what’s viable. He’s wonderfully educated, and has done so, so much brilliant work, but he’s lived his life in the cozy parlor of the rationalists. Jordan has actually lived in the insane, chaotic empirical world that exists outside such elite spaces.
I don’t want to level ad hominem arguments at anyone. I’m simply trying to explain why, in so many ways, Jordan actually seems more grounded and empirical to me than Stephen, why his ideas have more blood in them than Stephen’s, which sound very good and very brilliant but somehow seem less real in the light of the mundane realities of life. All this despite Stephen’s proclivity for empiricism.
I think Jordan, for all his religious language, actually has a lot more dirt under his fingernails. And he’s embraced religion as a tool, because he’s been out in the field really working the ground, and found it very useful. He’s found that it actually speaks very closely to and captures the lived, empirical realities of human life. Religion is powerful because it has to be, because of what it communicates and what it wrestles with. Confronting serious evils develops serious goods. But serious goods are themselves very dangerous, both positively and negatively if they become corrupt. And that’s certainly true for religion. It represents the realities of humans and human life very well in that sense.
Stephen’s approach is a delight and very amusing and lovely. And maybe if we were all Stephen Fry it would be enough. But he’s almost too elevated, too brilliant, too witty, too eloquent, too able to take apart everything. He condescends to our level, but we cannot all rise to his.
In a better world there would be no problem having both of these men giving input. But so many people, including the humanistic atheists, seem to believe that it’s very important to stomp everyone else into the ground and sweep away their objectionable perspectives to make way for the necessary utopia. And they’re being outcompeted in this by belief systems with less rationality but with more blood in them, like the authoritarian left and right, the woke tyrants that Stephen bemoans.
Dave Rubin is someone who probably held (at one point) a position more similar to Stephen’s, and he has embraced the right (maybe more than he should have) because he noticed that his own humanist liberalist worldview seemed to have an insufficient defense against the authoritarian left. That’s a vulnerability in atheistic liberalism. It doesn’t have much of a defense against religious liberalism. Religious traditionalism does, however.
Stephen is British, and so he’s a traditionalist (I think be his own admission), but he’s also an artist, so he’s fairly liberal. I think he is very much a needed voice and very helpful. But I also think he’s overly optimistic about the chances of his tradition’s outlook in the face of modern challenges, and insufficiently cognizant of his own role (or the role of his philosophy) in weakening and deconstructing the socio-cultural foundations of those traditions.
To paraphrase Neitzshe, the rationalists killed god without being able to invent a sufficient substitute, and now they complain when new gods awaken to slake their thirst upon the worship of the people who have walked away from the anemic substitutes offered them. Postmodernism is the psychologically and philosophically necessary return of an updated form of paganism, my gods against yours, that the failure of modernism precipitated. And that’s an empirical and historical reality, as much as the rationalists might wish it otherwise and might wish humanity otherwise (more like Stephen and less like itself). Religious feeling didn’t go away, it simply took a new form.
In fact, the people fighting for atheism are fighting a silly and irrelevant fight. They have completely misidentified the problematic element in humanity, and they have failed to recognize which features are essential to our identity as humans and which aren’t and what can and cannot be altered or replaced.
Atheism could win completely against Christianity and Judaism and Islam, and you would still have all the same problems and struggles and conflicts. The rational humanists themselves are on the edge of being overwhelmed and forced to the fringes and pilloried by the woke leftists. All the things they have complained about are able to express and maintain themselves quite easily in an atheistic philosophical context like postmodernism. And it’s hard to really argue effectively why they shouldn’t, apart from the fact that you don’t like it. There isn’t a God to call in as backup for an objective moral or social order. There isn’t an authoritative answer to the most important “why” questions, or any definitive purpose or direction that must be followed.
At least within Christianity you could turn to various passages and the person of Christ and point out that the corruption and abuse of the church was in conflict with the fundamental tenets of its guiding text and leader. Religious authority can be abused, but it can also be used to refute and repudiate abuse. It’s a powerful tool, and a dangerous one. But people will still wield the power of authority, will vest it in themselves and their own little gods, whether churches stand or fall. The one advantage of the Christian God is that it is clearly foolishness to complain that he (or the truth) belongs to you, a mere human. It requires the whole church collectively in collaboration just to get the smallest handle on him and his truth. And that’s both unifying and democratic.
Making Nobody Happy 