BLACKS AND RELIGION?

Newbie First Class Joined: Oct 01, 2004 Posts: 26

Thomas Sowell is a conservative, which automatically disqualifies him in my eyes, but he is said to be a serious intellectual, which would distinguish him between the crop of black conservative imbeciles hawked in the mass media today.

Black American religion has historically fostered contrary tendencies, both revolutionary and quietist tendencies. James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , documents the most negative tendencies. But Richard Wright cryptically delved into the deep psychology of the matter in his breakthrough 1942 story "The Man Who Lived Underground".

mlackey wrote:

Everbleed, Thank you so much for your kind remarks. And thank you for sending the name of Thomas Sowell. I have not read any of his works, and it appears that he has published numerous books and articles. If you can think of anything specific to recommend, I would certainly appreciate it.

To your other question (why so many blacks accept the religion of their oppressors), I have been struggling to answer this for years. I think Oncilla made an important observation in an earlier message. In the nineteenth century, when the black church started to formulate its view of liberation theology, blacks conceived of Moses and Christ as the grand liberators. Granted, the Bible does not condemn slavery, and it even condones slavery in many places, but for many blacks within the liberation theology tradition, they felt that they did not have to read the Bible literally. David Walker and Maria W. Stewart explicitly reject certain passages from the Bible. Given this strong tradition of liberation, many blacks felt that the Black Church was the only space where they could experience community and empowerment.

But, to my mind, it was a deceptive form of empowerment. Just as the Black Church was using the Gospels to evolve a theology of liberation, the White Church was using the same Gospels to evolve a theology of oppression--James Baldwin (in The Fire Next Time), Zora Neale Hurston (in Dust Tracks on a Road), and Richard Wright (in White Man, Listen!) demonstrate how the Bible and Christian teaching were used simultaneously to empower and to oppress.

This is a very simple answer to your very complex question, but it is at least a beginning. I am trying to formulate a more comprehensive answer, but I suspect it will be years before I produce anything that will be satisfying. Do you have any theories? I would like to hear them.

All Best,
michael

Newbie First Class Joined: Oct 01, 2004 Posts: 26

Everbleed betrays himself as an ignorant right-wing piece of crap. But as to the content argued here, there is a difference between the consequences of de facto segregation and separatism. Many of us who function on both sides of the racial divide are perceptive of its deleterious consequences. People have a natural tendency to be in a rut anyway, but the ramifications of social segregation are long-term and deep. Conservative black intellectual hustlers like Shelby Steele and John McWhorter love to make these blanket accusations of separatism, which presumably go over with their white audiences. My perception of the reality is quite different. Conformity and provincialism abound, but they are not separatism.

mlackey wrote:

Everbleed, When you get the titles of those articles, please let me know. I'm anxious to read some of Sowell's work.

I do want to respond to some of your other comments. You say: "I also believe that the "black culture" has mistakenly embraced anti-intellectualism and has convinced itself that the way to "liberation" is by separation from the "dominant culture" and the rejection of reason, shared language and science. When Michael Jackson made "bad" "good";when gangsters, drug dealers and pimps became idolized and emulated; when black preachers blamed every ill on the "white man"; it seemed the black man surrendered his free will and his ability and even desire to think. Instead they find complaint and anger as the "solution"."

I don't think that I would say that "black culture" has embraced anti-intellectualism, as much as I would say that anti-intellectualism is rampant in American culture. I have taught at universities in Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York, and Kentucky, and I have found many students, white and black, who have taken an anti-intellectual approach to life, but I have also had the good fortune to teach many students, white and black, who reverence the life of the mind. That anti-intellectualism has infected much of the United States is impossible to dispute. But that the black community suffers from this ailment more than any other community--well, I see no evidence of that.

As for your claim about transvaluing good and bad, I believe that the Marquis de Sade, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Virginia Woolf developed those ideas and provided some insightful justification for doing so over the last three centuries. For instance, Woolf argues that the concept of the "Angel in the House" was used as a conceptual instrument to enslave women at an unconscious level. For Woolf, the only way a woman could actually make progress in the world of men was to violate accepted conventions of propriety, which translated into women being bad from her contemporaries' perspective. In other words, the only way for women to make progress, according to Woolf, was to be bad. Conversely, being good was the perfect way to ensure that the condition of women would not improve.

Here's where I think I would make an important qualification. When you refer to Michael Jackson making "bad" "good," you are referencing a pop-culture example, and as far as I'm concerned, pop culture is deeply entrenched in anti-intellectualism. Frantz Fanon, the famous African revolutionary, also transvalues good and bad, as he realizes, like Virginia Woolf, that being "good" has been the best way to enslave disempowered people. Specifically, Fanon realized that colonized Africans were indoctrinated by their colonizers with a system of morality that benefited their oppressors. From Fanon's perspective, therefore, Africans who desired to be "good" were the colonizers' greatest asset. Moreover, Fanon suggests that the only way Africans could actually achieve national and individual independence was to be "bad," that is, bad as their oppressors defined it. This transvaluation of good and bad is not anti-intellectual, as is Michael Jackson's. It is an alternative intellectual approach. The distinction I would make is this: pop culture, in its anti-intellectual way, has transvalued good and bad, and in the process, it has done some serious damage. Intellectuals have transvalued good and bad, and there have been some good political reasons for doing this. But times have changed. Frantz Fanon's model of transvaluation, which was so effective in the fifties through the seventies, is not as effective today.

One last comment: I have given lectures on African American atheism in Germany, Scotland, England, Boston, New York, D.C., Chicago, and a number of other cities, and while my lectures generally inspire a passionate response (both negative and positive), many African Americans confess that they are humanists, atheists, and rationalists. Most tell me the same thing--it took much courage to become a non-believer, for there is much pressure coming from their families to believe. But the numbers of African American intellectuals who are non-believers is staggeringly high, much higher, I believe, than most people suspect.

So sorry for the long post. But your message made me think seriously about all of this, and much more.

Talk to you later,
michael

Newbie Joined: May 18, 2008 Posts: 22

Ralphellectual, You claim: "Your labelling of Richard Wright as a 'postmodern humanist' is prima facie preposterous." Given the dogmatic nature of your claim, I can assume that you know a considerable deal about Richard Wright and postmodernism. Before I answer your question, can you tell me how you define postmodernism. And second, as careful readers of Wright know, he started reading the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Vaihinger, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre closely and carefully in the mid to late 1940s. As you probably know, these four writers are considered some of the founding fathers of postmodernism. In your estimation, did Wright reject their views? Again, based on the dogmatic nature of your last post, I'm assuming that you think so. But on what basis do you make this claim? What works of Wright do you have in mind in order to justify your claim that Wright rejected postmodernism? When you answer these questions, I will be in a better position to respond to yours.

All Best,
michael

Newbie First Class Joined: Oct 01, 2004 Posts: 26

Since when are Sartre and Vaihinger postmodern writers? And what specific influence did they have on Wright that would allow him to be labelled such even if they were? In any case, the reotractive application of this label is entirely anachronistic and untenable. Wright in particular did not have a postmodern bone in his body, even before postmodernism existed.

As far as Wright's development is concerned, the sequence of events surrounding his assimilation of existentialism, as compared to his autonomous development of similar themes, even before engaging the Europeans, is not immediately obvious. I corresponded at length with Constance Webb on this matter.

Wright obviously rejected nihilism. Otherwise, I see the influence going primarily from Wright to Sartre and de Bouvoir than vice versa.

This ridiculous association of Wright with postmodernism seems to me another academic scam, on par with the current attempt to inflate the cultural capital of black studies by pumping up Nietzsche within it. It's disgusting.

Newbie First Class Joined: Apr 26, 2008 Posts: 44

Ralphellectual wrote:

As far as Wright's development is concerned, the sequence of events surrounding his assimilation of existentialism, as compared to his autonomous development of similar themes, even before engaging the Europeans, is not immediately obvious.

Thank you Ralph!

I gave the above sentence to my daughter to take to her Language Arts class on Tuesday. The kids will certainly learn the definition/origin/history of a new word or two.

So even your whiny, hostile, angry posts can occasionally have a positive effect.

By the way...

I implied you are a teenager. You called me a "piece of crap".

You talk about postmodern. How about pre-modern? In "the good ol' days" you would be urging me to hunt your pompous ass down and kick it till it screamed for mercy. But alas... you get to hide behind your Internet connection and civil society and pretend you are a bad-ass.

I have seen this phenomena many, many times before over the past ten years. People feel safe in their digital anonymity and believe (generally correctly) that there will be no repercussions for their un-civil behavior. (And yes most of these people are "children".) They believe they can safely shed even the pretext of social dignity and personal respect. They believe they can throw down a gauntlet with impunity. It gives them an inflated (and ultimately false) sense of their personal invulnerability. It is also, in my "conservative" opinion, one of the more deleterious effects of the "Internet revolution".

You obviously believe you know so much. You certainly know some words and how to arrange them.

But I will assert right here that I know that you would not dare to call me a "piece of crap" to my face.

Newbie Joined: May 18, 2008 Posts: 22

Everbleed, I think you are wasting your time responding to Ralphellectual. Almost everything he writes is either an ad hominem attack or an incoherent sentence. I asked him to define postmodernism, and he will not do so, I suspect, because he can't. All he knows is that it is something evil and wrong, which he irrationally attacks rather than intelligently defines. In my view, it is best to stick with rational arguments, and when you engage people who are driven by a fanatical, fundamentalist (Christians are not the only fundamentalist out there) ideology, logical arguments have no effect.

In any event, have you seen Spike Lee's movie >Bamboozled?< If not, Lee examines the distinction between the "field nigger" and the "house nigger" as it functions both within the black community and corporate America. Given the last post you directed to me, I think you would find this movie fascinating, that is, if you haven't see it already.

Talk to you later,
michael

Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 12:38 pm

mlackey wrote:

Ralphellectual, You claim: "Your labelling of Richard Wright as a 'postmodern humanist' is prima facie preposterous." Given the dogmatic nature of your claim, I can assume that you know a considerable deal about Richard Wright and postmodernism. Before I answer your question, can you tell me how you define postmodernism. And second, as careful readers of Wright know, he started reading the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Vaihinger, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre closely and carefully in the mid to late 1940s. As you probably know, these four writers are considered some of the founding fathers of postmodernism.

Nice reference. Not many people mention Vaihinger, and his "As If" approach, I've brought up his name with a postmodernist professor and he didn't even recognize the name....

Newbie First Class Joined: Apr 26, 2008 Posts: 44

m

I recall Tom Paine wrote something like....

"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

Or something to that effect.

Anyway, I was senior admin in a large online gaming clan for three years and probably developed an unconscious reflex of reminding miscreants to behave and more often than not giving back to them what they had given to the clan. Good times.

I had the bad luck to encounter Ralph on my first foray into TIG and he was so terribly reminiscent of griefers and idiots, (some who pretend to be intellectuals), that I think I simply couldn't control my conditioning.

So I will ignore Ralph from here on in and "pray" the TIG "clannies" do the same. (Although I admit that I do lust after another of his sentences, if only to send to the local high school for comical dissection and analysis.)

I put Bamboozled on the top of my Netflix Queue. I bought your book, (hardcover new at only $25.00!), and look forward to reading it.

Bleed

Newbie Joined: May 18, 2008 Posts: 22

todangst wrote:

mlackey wrote:

Ralphellectual, You claim: "Your labelling of Richard Wright as a 'postmodern humanist' is prima facie preposterous." Given the dogmatic nature of your claim, I can assume that you know a considerable deal about Richard Wright and postmodernism. Before I answer your question, can you tell me how you define postmodernism. And second, as careful readers of Wright know, he started reading the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Vaihinger, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre closely and carefully in the mid to late 1940s. As you probably know, these four writers are considered some of the founding fathers of postmodernism.

Nice reference. Not many people mention Vaihinger, and his "As If" approach, I've brought up his name with a postmodernist professor and he didn't even recognize the name....

Todangst, It doesn't necessarily surprise me that a postmodernist professor wouldn't recognize Vaihinger, and this comment is not intended to be a swipe at the professor you mention. At the moment, there are many different traditions of postmodernism, and based on a person's intellectual point of departure, he or she will have a different take on the movement. For instance, postmodernists who trace the origin of postmodernism back to Heidegger's >Being and Time<1927>The Outsider,< and in Wright's notes and in earlier versions of the novel, Nietzsche figures prominently. But I could not find any direct reference to Vaihinger. But I still suspect that Vaihinger played a role in his thinking as he was composing the novel.

Hope this clarifies what I meant in my earlier email.

Talk to you later,
michael

Newbie Joined: May 18, 2008 Posts: 22

Todangst, For some reason, my earlier post did not come through in whole. Here is the longer version of what I wrote.

It doesn't necessarily surprise me that a postmodernist professor wouldn't recognize Vaihinger, and this comment is not intended to be a swipe at the professor you mention. At the moment, there are many different traditions of postmodernism, and based on a person's intellectual point of departure, he or she will have a different take on the movement. For instance, postmodernists who trace the origin of postmodernism back to Heidegger's >Being and Time<1927>The Outsider,< and in Wright's notes and in earlier versions of the novel, Nietzsche figures prominently. But I could not find any direct reference to Vaihinger. But I still suspect that Vaihinger played a role in his thinking as he was composing the novel.

Hope this clarifies what I meant in my earlier email.

Talk to you later,
michael

Newbie Joined: May 18, 2008 Posts: 22

Todangst, I think I figured out the problem. Here's the message.

It doesn't necessarily surprise me that a postmodernist professor wouldn't recognize Vaihinger, and this comment is not intended to be a swipe at the professor you mention. At the moment, there are many different traditions of postmodernism, and based on a person's intellectual point of departure, he or she will have a different take on the movement. For instance, postmodernists who trace the origin of postmodernism back to Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927) tend to focus on Being, that which cannot be reduced to a concept or an idea. But postmodernists who trace the origin of postmodernism back to Nietzsche's work, especially the books he wrote from 1886 to 1888, tend to focus on the way language brings into conceptual existence that which it names. For those postmodernists who focus on the historical evolution of the movement, and for those who tend to be in a Nietzschean tradition, Vaihinger is of major importance, as he should be. Vaihinger's philosophy of the as-if is a brilliant conflation of Kant's transcendental idealism and Nietzsche's anti-foundationalist theories of conceptual systems. In my own estimation, Richard Wright, who owned a copy of Vaihinger's "Philosophy of the As-If," made an enormous contribution to the history of ideas by bringing together ideas from Vaihinger and Nietzsche in his novel, The Outsider. If you are a fan of Vaihinger, and if you have not read this novel, I think you will find it absolutely fascinating and insightful.

By the way, here is what I take to be a reference to Vaihinger in the novel. The district attorney is talking to the main character, and he uses an "as if" approach to construe theories about the world. Here's what he says: "'It's an 'as if' proof...Know what I mean?'" (378). Admittedly, this is not enough to prove that Wright had Vaihinger's philosophy in mind as he was composing his novel, but we do know that he owned a copy of Vaihinger's book, and his take on Nietzsche is strikingly similar to Vaihinger's. I just spent a week at Yale's Beinecke Library looking at the manuscript versions of "The Outsider," and in Wright's notes and in earlier versions of the novel, Nietzsche figures prominently. But I could not find any direct reference to Vaihinger. But I still suspect that Vaihinger played a role in his thinking as he was composing the novel.

Hope this clarifies what I meant in my earlier email.

Talk to you later,
michael

Newbie Joined: May 18, 2008 Posts: 22

todangst wrote:

mlackey wrote:

Ralphellectual, You claim: "Your labelling of Richard Wright as a 'postmodern humanist' is prima facie preposterous." Given the dogmatic nature of your claim, I can assume that you know a considerable deal about Richard Wright and postmodernism. Before I answer your question, can you tell me how you define postmodernism. And second, as careful readers of Wright know, he started reading the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Vaihinger, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre closely and carefully in the mid to late 1940s. As you probably know, these four writers are considered some of the founding fathers of postmodernism.

Nice reference. Not many people mention Vaihinger, and his "As If" approach, I've brought up his name with a postmodernist professor and he didn't even recognize the name....

Todangst, One last comment. Tim Madigan, who was once the editor of Free Inquiry, is trying to get Vaihinger's "As If" book back into print. Don't know if he has had any luck finding a publisher, but he is teaching, I believe, at St. John Fisher. If you contact him, he can let you know if the book will be coming out in a new edition. I certainly hope it will, as I am a big Vaihinger fan.

Talk to you later,
michael

Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 12:19 pm

Well I'm sorry I missed this entire exchange. I had an accidental opporunity to vacaion in the mountains for a full week, which I spent mostly swimming with my daughter.

Richard Wright is one of my favorite authors, a truly revolutionary literary figure and in my view not as acknowledged as he should be only for being black. The Outsider, my personal favorite (I have a first run copy), clealry shows significant existential influence. I think his humanist tendencenies matured only after he rejected the so-called communism soviet-style of the day. In some important ways, the betrayal of soviet communism resembles the betrayal of black slaves under christianity. The rhetoric was love and eventual justice, the reality was mass control ala 1984.

Lackey,
Out of curiosity, how did you find yourself here? I believe I was the first to mention your book in this thread.

Your book actually was an effort, by which I mean the modern spate of New Atheist books I consider largely effortless (Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins). I wish there was more like it. I've largely given up reading "atheist literature" as for someone like me it's all too obvious and hardly needs dissertation. The works I return to are typically essays written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries like Bradlaugh and John MacKinnon Robertson. I simply feel like very little has been added since then.

I feel the same about a lot of 'left' politics. Little has been added to feminism since Mary Wollstonecraft, except for, interestingly, the contributions of black female authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

Newbie First Class Joined: Apr 26, 2008 Posts: 44

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that mlackey simply Googled his name and found your post kmisho, which in my opinion was most fortunate. So thank you kmisho! I look forward to reading mlackey's book and he is certainly a wonderful addition to TIG.

BTW. I tend to agree with you about current A literature. I too think it may be beating a dead horse, but at least people seem to be buying it. There is the other benefit that some people who had no faith but were inarticulate as to why, may have benefited as well. I know for a fact that my 13 year old daughter surely benefited from Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. It was short, to the point and kept her interest. That in itself is wonderful considering we are living in the MTV generation.

Unless rational thought is "popularized" pretty soon, we may all find ourselves in deep crap. So write on you Atheist writers, write on. Now what we need are some good movies and music to go with the books and we might have something.

On more thing. How about Tom Paine in your list of early and significant authors? The Age of Reason is a masterpiece, even if it is deist rather than atheist. However it is really one of (if not) the first "readable" English books that could be assimilated by the "common man". Some even argue that it was the foundation of early free-thought movements.

P.s. Just for grins I googled my name and sure enough this thread was number four on the list, unfortunately it had to quote Ralphs insults. My fifteen minutes has started... Very Happy

Newbie First Class Joined: Oct 01, 2004 Posts: 26

I'm not sure when The Outsider began to be rehabilitated. Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic comes to mind. Flawed or not, I found this novel riveting and consumed it in a 24-hour period. You are, however, not quite correct about surfacing of either humanist or existentialist tendencies. I can no longer remember much about his earlier fiction published in his lifetime after all these years, but to my recollection one already finds "existentialist" themes in Native Son (1940). And certainly in "The Man Who Lived Underground" (first versions, 1942), in which overt politics virtually drops out. I think Wright was tiring of the CPUSA about this time, but I don't think he announced this publicly until 1944. But Wright was always trying to inject his sensibility into his work, and it didn't require a formal engagement with "existentialism" to do so. Retracing who influenced whom and exactly when is not always an easy affair. In addition, oral history--personal memory--can be dodgy after several decades.

The "new atheist" literature seems to be of use for weaning doubting Christians away from their indoctrination, but it's mostly the same-old-same-old. But politically these people are horrible, and backwards compared to the freethinkers of old. The science-worship is rather naive and ignorant both of history and politics. I'd prefer to see more engagement with social theory and the humanities--sans postmodernism, of course.

kmisho wrote:

Richard Wright is one of my favorite authors, a truly revolutionary literary figure and in my view not as acknowledged as he should be only for being black. The Outsider, my personal favorite (I have a first run copy), clealry shows significant existential influence. I think his humanist tendencenies matured only after he rejected the so-called communism soviet-style of the day. In some important ways, the betrayal of soviet communism resembles the betrayal of black slaves under christianity. The rhetoric was love and eventual justice, the reality was mass control ala 1984.

[.....]

Your book actually was an effort, by which I mean the modern spate of New Atheist books I consider largely effortless (Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins). I wish there was more like it. I've largely given up reading "atheist literature" as for someone like me it's all too obvious and hardly needs dissertation. The works I return to are typically essays written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries like Bradlaugh and John MacKinnon Robertson. I simply feel like very little has been added since then.

I feel the same about a lot of 'left' politics. Little has been added to feminism since Mary Wollstonecraft, except for, interestingly, the contributions of black female authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.


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