“Persecution and the Art of Acting”

Posted on by under Fatwas, General announcements

I have a longish essay in the Fall 2023 issue of Isonomia Quarterly, a newish online journal edited by Brandon Christenson of Notes on Liberty. The essay is called “Persecution and the Art of Acting,” a take-off on Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing. It’s an informal autobiographical account of my commitment to a Judeo-Islamic form of religious fictionalism.

Sample belligerent passage:

Jews, Muslims, and atheists all make claims to religious freedom, but usually make those claims under a single description–”Jew,” “Muslim,” “atheist.” As a fictionalist, I make the same claim to freedom under all three descriptions at once, reserving the right to add as many more descriptions as I wish. In short, when it comes to religious freedom, I demand the right to have things all ways at once, and demand the right to act on it without apology. Some may find that endearing. Others may find it offensive. I regard it as non-negotiable.

I guess we’ll see what happens when the first fatwas come in.

August 15: Front page treatment at Real Clear Religion. The irony. Ht: Brandon Christensen

irony

25 thoughts on ““Persecution and the Art of Acting””

  2. Intriguing article. Your fictionalism reminds me of TS Elliott and Roger Scruton who became Anglican based on an intellectual yearning to preserve Western culture, rather than out of any real belief. Scruton’s The Soul of the World is tragic in its yearning for faith without the true substance of belief. After I came to understand Scruton’s fictionalism, in your terms, it took me a while to come to a conclusion about what I thought of it, as a believer. In the end I concluded that it is good for him and for the world to try or going through the right motions, but it makes me sad that he is so close but couldn’t quite grasp the real faith in God that means so much to me.

    Or more mundanely, we could consider any number of people who go to church/mosque/synagogue/whatever for the community, either without any care beyond the worldly, or in many cases without even the intellectual or spiritual capacity to really understand what it all means. I would say to them the same as I would say to you – I hope that someday the act of trying, of going through the motions, will help you find and connect with the real God in full substance.

    Sometimes we must first cast off our false notions of God in order to find Him as He really is.

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    • Thanks for your comment. I actually am heavily influenced by Scruton, though he’s written so much that I haven’t read his work on this particular topic. I browsed both The Soul of the World and The Face of God for long enough to put them both on my reading list, but also to be daunted by the amount of sustained effort it would take to do them justice. I hadn’t really thought of Scruton as a fictionalist, though, at least not in the sense I had intended. On my view, God is literally a fictional character, and Scripture is a fiction on par with an epic or a novel. Granted, some epics or novels are “based on true events.” I’d say the same of Scripture. Which events are true, and what it means to be “based” on them, is a long story.

      I wouldn’t close the door on theism, but I think it’s unlikely I will ever become a full-fledged theist. I have more objections to theism than I can resolve in the life that’s left to me. What’s more certain is that I will never become a wholehearted secularist. As I say, I went through a militant atheist phase, but I think I underestimated the weakness and shallowness of secular thinking at the time. In the end, my fictionalism is more about religion than it is about theism. For some religious believers, that makes it slightly better than ordinary atheism; for others, worse.

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        • Thanks for the link. You have dealt with much more of Scruton’s output than I have. I like him as a defender of the West against postmodern absurdity (political and aesthetic), but I find his aristocratic and elitist tendencies unnecessary.

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          • Agreed. I sort of regret that Scruton saw himself more as a defender of the West than as a plain old humanist. In that sense, his polemic against Edward Said strikes me as a bit of a lost opportunity. Said started his career as a kind of Nietzschean or Foucaultian anti-realist about truth, but gravitated toward a more humanist ideal later in his career. I guess it falls to later generations to do right by the issues that divided Scruton and Said about “the West and the Rest.”

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  5. This is an interesting new journal. As for religious freedom, I certainly think anyone is free to try out ideas from virtually any religion (maybe a few are just too heinous, but I won’t try to specify a limit here). And free to combine ideas from them — although eventually that could lead to inconsistency. And to practice parts of one or more of them in a fictionalist sense. Still, in terms of normative weight, fictions seem to me to have that in features of their story that accurately track something real in a non-fictional sense (I have thought about this a lot with respect to the concept of fantasy literature). So it would not make sense to me to say, for example, that I find something in the archaic ethic of loyalty in the Iliad compelling for my own life, even though I think it gives an entirely false picture of what normatively valulable types of loyalty involve.

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    • Just as reconciling a “too heinous” limit on allowance of religious thought and practice is tricky, so is the idea of fictionalist religious thought and practice being too far removed from genuine virtue, value, obligation or the like for personal acceptance (or public allowance or protection) to pass relevant normative muster. (However, I agree with what you say about this kind of normative muster being required for personal acceptance to be justified, or, in the objective mode, relevantly truth-tracking.)

      Some religious fictionalists I have known, though getting enjoyment from some religious tradition or practice, do not take the whole thing very seriously. I’m not sure this meets traditional liberal criteria for a special sort of public allowance or protection.

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      • I guess my response here is the same as my response to John on heinousness. I don’t think a realist interpretation of religion is either necessary or sufficient for taking it seriously, and don’t think that fictionalism is necessary or sufficient for moral non-seriousness. Many conventional (realist) believers take their religious commitments very, very casually. One can’t infer from a straightforward realist profession of faith that the person takes his religion all that seriously. Likewise a person can give religion a fictionalist interpretation and take it very seriously (perhaps too seriously). There’s the danger of living in a fiction to the detriment of a sense of reality. Of course, fictionalism is also conducive to a casual, even frivolous attitude toward religion, which I count as a feature rather than a bug.

        Personally, I don’t think that religion in any incarnation deserves special allowance or protection. So it doesn’t bother me that fictionalism doesn’t. But it deserves as much protection as any other interpretation. No one inquires too closely into the metaphysical presuppositions of most peoples’ religious beliefs. I don’t think there’s any reason to do so vis-a-vis fictionalism, either. Though they don’t use the term “fictionalism,” I’m inclined to think that when ontological push comes to shove, many supposedly conventional believers end up as fictionalists anyway. Both Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism is about as close to fictionalism as you can get. Same with Unitarianism. Though they often lack the freedom to say this, I suspect that many supposedly conventional Muslims are really crytpo-fictionalists. They just aren’t allowed to say so.

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        • I think there are (to some extent, were, for a secularizing society such as ours) clear reasons of both distinctive personal importance and avoidance of deep-seated social conflict to provide special public allowance and protection for religion. It is a bit unclear to me which similar things (not officially religions) in a secular society would perhaps qualify for the same allowance and protection. In many ways, woke-ism (and science-worship and crusading atheism and Objectivism of course) function as religions. Really any deep personal conviction, somewhat irrational and held on a large scale, meets both the distinctive personal importance and danger-to-social-peace conditions. I’m inclined to think that this justifies a kind of liberal “serious conviction tolerationism” that is somewhat broader than traditional liberal norms toward religion. Though I’m not sure what the exact contours of this would be or how it would be realized or codified in culture or law.

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    • I agree that there has to be a “heinousness” constraint, but I don’t think that’s specific to fictionalism. There has to be a heinousness constraint on anything we do, whether religious or otherwise, or fictionalist or otherwise. I don’t think fictionalism faces any special problems in that respect. Certainly agree that living out the ethos of the Iliad would be problematic. In a way, fictionalism faces less of a problem than conventional religious belief, because it faces no constraints on revision. If something is morally objectionable in a given religion, a fictionalist can blithely ignore it or set it aside. A conventional religious believer faces the live issue of how to deal with what is arguably a divine injunction from a deity construed on a metaphysical realist interpretation. That’s a “heavier lift” as we say in business.

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  6. I really enjoyed that piece. Especially your entertaining, autobiographical story-telling. You are quite good at that (with a twist in format, you’d have some pretty good stand-up comedy). There is much of this that I cannot relate to “from the inside,” having been raised as basically a secular humanist (though I just found a photo from my christening, probably in the Episcopal Church). Though I’ve long ago abandoned militant atheism (roughly, alongside abandoning Objectivism) — I now regard this as an expression of some of the worst bits of religious impulse — the value of personally inhabiting religious stories and beliefs and sharing these and associated practices communally is pretty foreign to me (especially the latter). I’m convinced that I’m missing something. I’m also quite interested in your dismissal (not necessarily objectively, but personally) of Buddhism. Most secular humanists (or secular-culture lost souls) who “get religion” seem to become Buddhists (or a kind of Buddhist fellow-traveller). Buddhism (or at least the half-baked version of it) always had only limited appeal to me, but it apparently had almost no appeal for you.

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    • Thanks. There is a fundamental divide between people who have been brought up religiously and those not. And though I was brought up in a religious household, once I got my “basic training,” I really went my own way almost from the outset. I think of “militant atheisms” as having two fundamentally different motivations: there is the militant atheism of those who have never been brought up in religion, and find it incomprehensible and absurd; and there is the militant atheism of those who have been brought up in a religion, and are rebelling against it. My own militant atheism was much more the latter than the former, but precisely because my religious upbringing was as pleasant as it was unpleasant (more pleasant than unpleasant, really), my rebellion against religion had shallow roots, and didn’t last long. Most militant atheists resent their religious upbringing, but I ended up making my peace with mine–despite regarding the claims of both Judaism and Islam as false, at least as taken literally by conventional believers. (“Making my peace” is actually a complicated matter. There are certainly many, many things in both Judaism and Islam that I fundamentally, categorically reject.)

      I found Buddhism utterly alien and alienating. For one thing, having grown up in Judaism and Islam, those two things seemed familiar and comforting in ways that Buddhism wasn’t. I had no concrete physical or emotional experiences to associate with Buddhism; it was purely an intellectual experiment and intellectual affair. So I couldn’t connect with it in any visceral way.

      I doubt I studied Buddhism very thoroughly, or gave it the fair shake it may well deserve. My rejection was less a matter of studied reflection than pure aversion to something incompatible with my personality. Islam is a pretty straightforwardly egoistic creed, and Islamic jihad puts activism front and center. Beyond that, Islam has a highly social component, as does Judaism. Those things are central to my personality, but Buddhism gave no outlet to any of it, as far as I could see. The Buddhist emphasis on suffering, selflessness, and the eradication of desire was pretty much a non-starter, as far as I was concerned. Again, this is a matter of personality, and of a very superficial engagement with Buddhism, not an objective verdict on Buddhism as such. In any case, as an initial encounter, there was nothing there to attract me or hold me. So I tried it for a week, fled, and never looked back.

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  7. Happy New Year. Hey Yea the God JeZeus, that Harry Potter pathetic forgery: That Protocols of the Elders of Zion Czar slander – new testament – counterfeit; that Av-tumah Reptilian – dead. 

    Just like the false prophet Muhammad – together with Allah. Goyim rejoice: Happy Joyous New Year!   Hail Deicide! You no longer have to waste your time praying to dead Gods. 

    Happy New Year, free at last, Free at last. LOL. These latest new Gods, gone the way of the Gods of Mt. Olympus, & Ceasar’s pantheon of Gods. Drinks on the House! לחיים. Freedom! Now that these new Gods – dead – Abracadabra!!  Poof.  Both Heaven and Hell cease to exist, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat.

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    • Sorry, I didn’t see this until well after the New Year. I’m not sure I should have approved this comment. It’s vaguely on topic, since it alludes to religion and fiction, but it’s also not on any topic, since it’s close to unintelligible.

      The anti-Christian part I get: you’re exulting over the crucifixion of Christ, and suggesting that Christians have no one left to worship. That’s not really what they believe, but you do you.

      I really have no idea whatsoever what Muhammad has to do with New Year’s Day in the Gregorian calendar, much less with deicide. And I don’t think you do, either.

      This is one of your dumber, more tone-deaf comments, I have to say. You’re addressing a mixed audience of atheists and theists, and suggesting that the deity of some of the theists is a phony. But most readers probably think you’re a phony. So we’re left with an unsatisfying stalemate.

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      • As a atheist praise God theology belief systems suck. Muslim strict monotheism, for example violates the 2nd Sinai commandment. Not to worship other Gods. If only one God as the Koran dictates for believers to believe then clearly this negates the 2nd Sinai commandment. LOL

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      • Biden faces a Presidential election in less than a Year’s time.  He’s doing horribly bad in the pre-election polling today.  The Gaza Abomination Oct 7th War, it compares to the Covid-19 mass epidemic which destroyed the 3 amazing years wherein under President Trump’s fabulous leadership the President Made America Great Again.

        I have worked in Gaza.  Plus, my moving company assisted Israelis out of Gaza, in compliance with PM Sharon’s leadership tremendous decision.  My moving trucks did not fly the orange ribbons of protest to PM Sharon’s unilateral decision.  I witnessed the horrors of looking down from the edge of the cliff of that near catastrophic Civil War which took Israelis to the brink of a Lebanese or Syrian total destruction of our young nation.

        Israel gave up all of Gaza to set up a Hong Kong model Island Palestinian State back in 2005.  We gave them the famous Gush Katif organic farms and several amazing milk farms (assets which i personally saw with my own eyes) which consisted of an engineered rotating slab of cement, which floated upon a thin layer of water, which permitted milk-cows to independently depart from their milk stations, and return back to their pens.  

        This revolutionary milking methodology permitted, in about the same time-period of milking, approximately double the amount of cows in the same time-period, as it took in the standard T-bone milking system set-up, used across the world by dairy farms.  These tremendous assets the Palestinians despised and immediately destroyed! 

        In the 2006 elections Hamas threw the PA, ie the Olso Accords out the window!  Between 2007 to 2024 Hamas has attacked Israel four times resulting in Wars.  The Hamas Charter calls for the total destruction of Israelis from the River to the Sea!  Now we Israelis no longer feel generous toward these dune-coon rag-headed dhimmi Arab refugee pigs.

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