Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada (2020)

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Aaron W. Hughes responds to his critics:

…all our narratives, terms, categories, and frames of reference emerge from the shadows, and we would do well to illumine them. Only by understanding these narratives and frames of reference—their genealogies, their investment in political, legal, intellectual, and social contexts—is it possible to reflect on where we have been, where we currently are, and where we are heading collectively.

…I do think the academic study of religion, both in Canada and abroad, is in a
precarious situation at the current moment. Enrollments in courses are down, provincial
funding for the arts post-COVID will inevitably be even worse than that in the pre-
COVID era… Will we survive?

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Is Israel Defensible? The cruel geostrategic logic of the Holy Land

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Christopher Caldwell writes for the Claremont Review of Books:

…the settlements are part of a conscious but never-written-down government policy: to divide the Palestinian population in such a way as to make the massing of force difficult and conspicuous, to separate Jerusalem from the Palestinian hinterland, and to provide the populated areas of Israel with enough strategic depth to minimize the damage of a sudden invasion. A lot more people than will openly declare it, including many who describe themselves as on the “left,” share this vision of Israel’s predicament and are willing to accept this as a solution. The defensible country—the country as a logical geostrategic unit—runs from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean, “from the river to the sea.” On this, hardline Israelis and radical Palestinians can seemingly agree.

…Israelis often repeat what some of the female hostages released from Gaza in November said on their return: “There are no civilians.”

…Under the influence of both religiosity and constant war, Israel is becoming the most right-wing advanced society on the planet… Israel grows steadily more attractive, as a place to move to, for those Jews who understand their religion and their peoplehood in a conservative way. It is the red state of world Jewry.

…when reservists were called up October 7, 130% reported—that is, men not required to go to war at all were refusing to leave army offices until they had received a role in this very dangerous conflict.

…Israelis are one people in a way that Americans are not. The Israeli Left and Right, even when heated and hateful, are doing something more elevated than just anathematizing each other. They are vying, however narrow-mindedly, for patriotic distinction.

…Whether to be part of the wider world (at the risk of losing yourself, your culture, your connection to God) or to keep to yourself (at the risk of provinciality and lost economic opportunity) is a decision that faces all peoples and individuals.

* Netanyahu’s coalition partners have one vision for defending Israel. It involves sovereignty, pro-natalist policies, prayer, and a command of military strong points—but at the risk of isolation, and even retaliation, from the outside world. The secular tech elites who lead the Israeli opposition propose another vision: good relationships with other global elites, above all those of the United States.

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Science Envy in Theories of Religion

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Aaron W. Hughes published in 2010:

In the recently published Contemporary Theories of Religion (Stausberg; 2009,
hereafter CTR), at least 9 of the 15 chapters are devoted to theories that interpret
and/or explain religion from perspectives that can loosely be labeled as “cognitivist,” “evolutionary” or “neuropsychological.”…

Stausberg argues that theories of religion must take into consideration four overlapping questions (2009: 3-6): (1) specificity (i.e., what is unique about religion); (2) origins (i.e., conditions that witness foe emergence/origination of religion); (3) functions (i.e., what religion is perceived to do); and (4) structure (e.g., coherence)…Yet, if I must address these questions, let me state (albeit hesitantly) that: (I) foe specificity of religion is its evocation of transcendence for believers (not theoreticians); (2) that it is invoked and/or appealed to in foe invention of cultural identity; (3) that its main function is self- and group-making; and (4) that its structure is, paradoxically, its lack of structure, namely, that “religion”’s porosity and instability permits manifold
and contradictory appeals across time and geography.

All of these four points pivot around a few key terms: identity, discourse, and invention….

I am calling for replacing one sort of reductionism (biological, cognitive) with another (issues of identity). The latter sort, it seems to me, enables us to factor in its ubiquity rather than isolate “religion” as an independent variable. Because I largely refuse to take religion seriously as a category, my form of reductionism hopefully accounts for “religion” as it is folded into, and indeed non-existent apart from, other historical, social, economical, and political forces…

…religions, like all social formations, are actively produced temporally, in time,
and in ways that are contingent upon social and ideological categories of alterity…

Rather than envisage the existence of a permanent inner core peculiar to each culture that confers upon it a veridical nature that determines present and future, cultural theorists prefer to stress the process of the subsequent elaboration of an ideology that speaks of the present by imagining an ideal past. Such a process enables those in the present to tame unruliness where meanings are often fraught with ambiguity and where identities are anything but stable.

…the liberal Protestant and ecumenical vision that currently reigns supreme in humanities-based theorizing on and about religion.

…Until science progresses, we have little evidence that we are any more predisposed
to religion than we are to economic or political systems. Religions, qua discourses that invoke transcendence, provide the tropes or the shards (or whatever we want to call them) that help facilitate the scattered, irregular, and often damaged hydra of identity, both collective or individual.

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Max Weber and the Two Universities

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Professor Stephen P. Turner published in January 2024:

No sooner than the ink had begun to dry (or should we say the pixels stopped changing) on the publications written to celebrate the centennial of Weber’s ‘Science as a Profession and Vocation’ ([1919]2012) than Covid and a series of shocks to the university, especially in the United States, changed the conditions for discourse. The shocks included the ‘enrollment cliff,’ the early arrival of an expected decline in students for
long-anticipated demographic reasons, an unexpectedly rapid decline in enrollments in the humanities, notably history, the recognition that young men especially were choosing not to go to college, a simultaneous and related turn against wokeness, a rapidly developing skepticism about the medical research establishment as a result of the admitted failure of Covid vaccines to prevent the disease as promised and the revelation of the false narratives that were officially promoted about its origins together with the silence of the grant-dependent academy and the intimidation of those who spoke out, the great price inflation and the spectacle of prominent academic economists minimizing what was part of people’s everyday experience, and ongoing crises of governance in universities as presidents resigned, and politicians and donors intervened.

If this were not enough, the events of October 7, 2023, produced an outburst of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian demonstrations that quickly veered into anti-Semitic and anti-western directions. The Presidents of three elite universities, called to testify to congress about their response, repeated carefully crafted excuses that were immediately
seen as hypocritical about free speech—defending students calling for genocide at the same time as they enforced elaborate regimes prohibiting misgendering and micro-aggressions, and promoting anti-racism. The scientist President of one major university, Stanford, had been caught up in a scandal involving what amounted to research fraud. The limited scholarship of the recently appointed President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was scrutinized after her performance at the congressional hearing and numerous instances of what was arguably plagiarism were found.

Much of the scrutiny was in politicized on-line forums which often either seized on them as evidence of fraudulence or attacked the scrutinizers as racists or as inferiors jealous of Harvard excellence; the main results appeared on Substack, and were selectively amplified in the subsequent public discussion. Soon older questions about the dataset some of this research was based on, which she had refused to share, were raised anew. But 700 Harvard faculty supported her in a petition, some probably motivated by the idea that outsiders should have no influence over the university. A smaller number called for her to resign.

The idea of academic freedom was caught up in this crisis. It was publicly challenged, along with the idea of freedom of speech in general, by the crisis produced by the Israeli-Palestinian war, which was seen as a source of harm, but also which produced problems over the key notions of harm, genocide, and hate speech, which now seemed to be selectively applied and in ways that reproduced the political and intellectual divisions that discourse was supposed to cure. This occurred against the background of an effort to delegitimate the west and ‘whiteness’ in the name of anti-racism, decolonization, and resistance to cognitive imperialism, incarceration, and environmental destruction, all
of which were to be laid at the feet of racialized capitalism. The war was a convenient fit for the zero-sum theory of oppression to the effect that every group’s misery was the result of another group’s ‘privilege’ and exploitation.1 This kind of speech was promoted; responses to it were punished. The short-term result of these conflicts was a widespread acceptance of the need to reconsider these core freedoms as harmful and speech in need of more regulation, especially on-line. But there was also a reaction in favor of free speech and academic freedom, and a sense that it had already been deeply compromised. The fact that people had come to self-censor and act out of fear had become obvious, and documented (Clark et al. 2023; Stevens, Jussim, and Honeycutt 2020).

There was much more: the US Supreme Court had just decided, on June 23, 2023, that the scheme of racial preferences that Harvard and the University of North Carolina had relied on were cases of illegal discrimination2, leading to a massive effort to circumvent the ruling and continue the practices under different terms. In science, retractions, conflict of interest issues, and financial misdeeds had become a worldwide epidemic, in part as a result of the metricization of research evaluation and rewards, in part because of the vast system of science funding itself, which produced an artificial competition oriented toward pay-offs rather than intellectual content, and, particularly in the US, great financial rewards for patents and business deals—the perfect example of the neoliberal idea of artificial competition. At the same time, in the humanities and the social sciences, employment in academic life has become more precarious. Tenure, and the freedoms it implied, has become rarer and alternative forms of support were tied to other agendas…

‘Just and sustainable’ is a fundamental desire that needs no rational support or additional justification, any more than any other desire. In practice the bad purposes came to be interpreted in terms of terms of ‘harm.’ The concept of harm became the de facto replacement for a value system. To ask where one got the authority to pronounce something good or bad was itself harmful: it asserted the authority of the harmer over the harmed. But this denial of authority was selective: only the oppressed, or those speaking for them, could say they were harmed…

Needless to say this understanding is never articulated as a coherent theory, which is why Brown uses the notion of desire. Harm is normally invoked by examples. Freedom of speech and protest over harmful speech is a typical case where the issue arises, and typically the value of freedom of speech (and protest) is not directly attacked, but a notion like ‘responsibility’ is invoked and an affective harm is described. An example of this is the exchange between Eddie Glaude, Jr. of Princeton, and Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Here the harm is entirely on the level of feelings.

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Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

Randall Schweller wrote in 2010:

ALTHOUGH THE BRITISH EMPIRE according to J. R. Seeley and Winston Churchill was acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, territorial expansion usually advances through a deliberate and collective will to imperial power, through a single-mindedness for expansion shared by both rulers and ruled… History shows that those restless leaders who have not only succumbed to imperial temptations but most zealously pursued their expansionist aims have generally led strong and unified polities, not weak and fragmented ones…

Operating within an anarchic, self-help environment, states must provide for the means of their own security and whatever other desires they develop; they must devise strategies, chart courses, and make decisions about how to meet internal and external exigencies… Realists argue, therefore, that expansion and preventive aggression to gain control over
scarce resources are often the best means of achieving more power and security in an anarchic setting that resembles Hobbes’s state of nature..

Yet there have been relatively few bids for hegemony in recent history. This is especially true in the Third Word, which consists of regions where significant power inequalities exist among neighboring states that should, according to offensive realism, engender opportunistic expansion. Since the end of the Cold War, however, very few Third World states have fought interstate wars, and the vast majority of Third World states have not even confronted significant external threats. As Jeffrey Herbst observes:
“Even in Africa, the continent seemingly destined for war given the colonially-imposed boundaries and weak political authorities, there has not been one involuntary boundary change since the dawn of the independence era in the late 1950s, and very few countries face even the prospect of a conflict with their neighbors. Most of the conflicts in Africa that have occurred were not, as in Europe, wars of conquest that threatened
the existence of other states, but conflicts over lesser issues that were resolved without threatening the existence of another state.”5 Likewise, K. J. Holsti comments: “The search for continental hegemony is rare in the Third World, but was a common feature of European diplomacy under the Habsburg, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Wilhelmine Germany, Hitler, and Soviet Union and, arguably, the United States.”6

Potentially powerful states such as India, South Africa, China, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil have chosen to remain potential regional hegemons rather than actual ones. None has even contemplated much less actively pursued a grand strategy to achieve this exalted status. And so what Gerald Segal claims about contemporary China can be said for all these countries: “China remains a classic case of hope over experience, reminiscent of de Gaulle’s famous comment about Brazil: It has great potential, and always will.”7Why have we seen so few wars of aggression in modern times?

…fascism shared many of realism’s core assumptions about world politics and views about the nature and role of the state. There are two very significant differences between fascism and realism, however: fascists did not believe in the balance of power and they
activated realist principles with a racist ideology that, unfortunately for humankind, succeeded in mobilizing the passions of the multitudes.

…if Germany had not attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler and Mussolini would have accomplished bold but prudent expansion for their states—expansion consistent with a
realist view of appropriate state interests and behavior because it did not provoke an overwhelmingly powerful counterbalancing coalition.

…a political regime that is able to mobilize and allocate resources to meet its policy commitments, has broad scope over societal activities and social groups, is autonomous from domestic and outside pressure groups, can command compliance from its subjects,
and enjoys the general consent of its citizenry will be less constrained to act in accordance with international systemic incentives than will a political regime that does not have these characteristics.

…Aside from the Mexican-American, Indian-American, and Spanish-American wars, U.S. growth in territory and power was accomplished by the attractiveness of its political system, which proved so seductive that other republics voluntarily relinquished their sovereignty and applied for admission to the American Union.

…Aggressive expansion requires a unified state composed of elites that agree on an ambitious grand strategy, and a stable and effective political regime with broad authority to pursue uncertain and risky foreign policies.

…Realism provides neither a theory of despotic power nor an ideology for whipping up nationalist sentiment to wage large-scale wars. Indeed, there is nothing about the realist creed that would stir the passions of average citizens in support of the state, much less cause them to rise up as one without regard to hardship. Large-scale mobilization campaigns in pursuit of risky and aggressive expansion require a crusade of some kind, which is precisely what realism decries as a basis for foreign policy.39 Realism is, instead, a cynical and largely pessimistic political philosophy about why things remain the same, why wars and conflict will persist, why the struggle for power and prestige among states will endure, and why, in Morgenthau’s words, “man cannot hope to be good but must be content with being not too evil.”40 At its core, realism is a hollow political doctrine, as E. H. Carr asserts: “realism, though logically overwhelming, does not provide us with the springs of action which are necessary even to the pursuit of thought. . . . Consistent realism excludes four things which appear to be essential ingredients of all effective political thinking: a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgment and a ground for action. . . . The necessity, recognized by all politicians, both in domestic and international affairs, for cloaking interests in the guise of moral principles is in itself a symptom of the inadequacy of realism.”

…fascism is offensive realism with a racist and social Darwinist overlay…

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