Wednesday 13 June 2012

On Capitalism and Christianity, William Connolly

Regarding Sonia Hazard's review:

My vocabulary is often chided for it strangeness, but this take on William Connolly's defense of evangelical religion left me with two additions (Deleuze and imbrication) that are completely and unconvincingly irrelevant to the serious issues at hand: the compatibility of a humane capitalism and contemporary American evangelical religion.

The French philosopher strikes me as polysyllabically delusional with nary any effort to relate the implications of imbrication to the problem at stake. (And I majored in philosophy at a Jesuit university and one of my Ph.D. prelims was American philosophy and its European antecedents.)

Indeed I quit teaching after 30 years for the more melioristic innovations of alternative journalism.Serendipitously, because my defection from Academe in 1982 mainly saved me the insane corruption of the Delusionists that inflicted most fatally, according to this review, North American humanist professors.(WHEW! that was close.)

Those abandoned colleagues should have been leading undergraduates through the new perils of mass culture. Instead they scrambled for tenure by boring each other with"serious" philosophy, ashamed as they had become comparing their thin gruel with the solid and escalating truths of natural science.

Never has shame been so intellectually corruptive. Their shallowness reminded me of the first papal declaration of infallibility in the nineteenth century when the Church was terrified by the inroads of Modernism. First proclamation: that the Virgin Mary was conceived without Original Sin, whatever that was.

Poor Saint Joseph, unwittingly doing his marital duties! Serious students of American politics realize that the "Christian" capitalism has recently derived from the Southern capitalists cynical reactions to Lyndon B.Johnson's legislation supporting black voters.

Jesus lovers turned into the likes of that nincompoop  Rush "Excellence in Broadcasting" Limbaugh and his Foxy likes. We have too many incompetent professors and too few Bill Moyers.

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