In a NY Times editorial, James Wood, totally-not-pretentious author of such failed books as “My White Teeth” and “How Fiction Works,” mounts the soapbox in order to flatter his staggering ego interject Anglo God politics in the Haitian-earthquake tragedy:
In the 18th century, the genre of “earthquake sermon” was good business. Two small shocks in London, in 1750, sent the preachers to their pulpits and pamphlets. The bishop of London blamed Londoners’ lewd behavior; the bishop of Oxford argued that God had woven into his grand design certain incidents to alarm us and shake us out of our sin. In Bloomsbury, the Rev. Dr. William Stukeley preached that earthquakes are favored by God as the ultimate sign of his wrathful intervention.
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We should expect nothing less from the man [Pat Robertson] who blamed legal abortion for Hurricane Katrina. But even when intentions are the opposite of Mr. Robertson’s, and in a completely secular context, theological language has a way of hanging around earthquakes. In his speech after the catastrophe, President Obama movingly invoked “our common humanity,” and said that “we stand in solidarity with our neighbors to the south, knowing that but for the grace of God, there we go.” And there was God once again. Awkwardly, the literal meaning of Mr. Obama’s phrase is not so far from Pat Robertson’s hatefulness. Who, after all, would want to worship the kind of God whose “grace” protects Americans from Haitian horrors?
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Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.
Numerous things are going on here. Firstly, he cherry-picks a few quotes like a sophomore writing a twilight essay for an 18th century-lit survey, implying that the views contained in those quotes were universal in their day, while simultaneously misinterpreting the philosophical meaning their speaker’s wished to convey. Next, he quietly reifies God as some imaginary friend or superhero whom we submit to judgment at every turn of personal misfortune, despite this utterly contingent existence of ours (without this most common of Atheist fallacies, his entire argument disintegrates). Then Woods’ linguistic economy refers to a right-wing loon like Pat Robertson, and the expectantly crazy statements of such a man, from which to generalize a standard against which all theological views cohere. In fact, he actually compares them with the statements of Barack Obama, saying their statements share something of the same theological program.
Duh… what?
While these are the usual rhetorical strategies of a sophomoric Atheist like Woods, the irony is that the truly neo-colonial infection is that of a limousine liberal like himself injecting an Anglo-American religious dialectic into a tragedy so great it has decimated an entire nation. The thing about Haiti is that it has become the ultimate media stage upon which to strut and fret one’s international views while referring to a national tragedy in circular fashion as both evidence and conclusion of that view. Meanwhile, Haiti stills suffers direly, and nothing is gained but by the ego’s of a few selfish, narcissistic Americans for whom editorializing has priority over the facts of the day. Anybody who’s anybody has alluded to Haiti as evidence of their own grandeur—so who are you!? Some hack giving your money and help in service to your beliefs, or like Woods, an impotent, do-nothing primadonna who’s found a cheap spotlight?
How is Wood’s ethos not colonialism in its properly exceptional, fashionably pseudo-Rationalist garments?
Woods, for example, is little more than a book salesmen, and a perfect example of both an Atheist practicing religion (poorly) and a literary blowhard practicing philosophy (very poorly). But the thing about American post-colonial literary buffs is that while they can very easily point to internal examples of their theories, somehow their own position as American pomo lit buffs is not equally arbitrary and circumstantial—somehow their socio-economic position evade its own criticisms (the case of one Henry Louis Gates springs to mind). And in the end, what began as an inquiry into the world turns, instead, to the very same shallowness it was brought forth the understand. All the while, American cultural hegemony is congealed and reaffirmed in yet another theater of the world, and America can go forth again, resting peacefully in the death-abhorring consumerist illusion that contingency is no part of our hyper-real existence.
