How unfunny is Catherine D?

Review: Catherine Deveney "God is Bullshit: That's the Good News"
 

Though it shouldn't dissuade you from becoming an atheist (or persuade you), the fact is that there have always been a fair number of them for whom the attraction is obviously the opportunity to have some rough fun at the expense of what other people take very seriously. These people are not so much born rebels as serial pests, Bart Simpsons in battle dress. If you wanted a technical name for them, it would have to be social scatologists - people whose atheism comes down basically to sticking their fingers up their bums, whipping them out and waving them round chanting gleefully that God, that pathetic non-existent fkn loser, hasn't struck them down for their sins yet. On the other hand, especially since the days religion started having to justify itself in the face of scientific enquiry, journalistic scrutiny and scatological provocation, there have always been quite a few testy metropolitans who have argued rather fatuously for their beliefs on the grounds of sheer historical necessity: religion has been taken seriously for the longest time and should therefore be taken seriously today. In a broadly secular society such as our own, the sort of ill-natured to-ing and fro-ing that goes on between the two groups seems like just another sideshow - an exercise in mutual irritation that the mainstream media is happy to bring to the boil, especially at the time of the two main Christian festivals, when the rest of the world is just taking a breather. Such is the eternal nil-all draw that seems bound to be replayed over and over again on the margins of the social realm.

Exactly why it's bound to be a nil-all draw is complex, but if I had to say in 30 words or less - what might, very roughly, be called the scientific view of the world has run into problems of its own, both intrinsic and extrinsic, but religion, including the Christian religion, has established itself as a bit of a refuge against some of the forces in the world that are advancing and have been for a long time and have caused a lot of people severe anxiety in the process. - Much as you might get people to agree in questionnaires to the proposition that they "believe what science says" (whatever that actually means), our society just doesn't seem capable of acquainting large enough numbers of people with the complex bodies of bio-geo-physical fact that fly in the face at least of more literalist interpretations of the Bible. On the other hand, there's probably a general perception that most Christians and religious folk take the notion of charity and social cohesion a little more seriously than most and much more seriously than they are, and indeed can be, taken by the dominant institution of the contemporary world - the market economy. Religion, in broad terms, probably isn't going backwards because there's a bit of a sense that it functions, partly, as a counterweight to the at times pitiless spirit of commercialism that permeates almost every aspect of the systems by which we supply our ever-multiplying material needs. If religion is not going backwards, I'd say, that has little to do with the fact that large numbers of people put themselves down as nominal Christians or say they believe in some sort of transcendent or supra-worldly plane - such beliefs are normally so totally content-less and so devoid of practical consequences that they should hardly be called religion at all and certainly not Christianity; but it does have to do with the not unjustifiable perception that religion is a viable path of self-restraint in a world dominated by grossly excessive consumption. The fewer needs you have the happier you are, as the saying goes; well, in the crack-brained rooting-tooting-cussing-gorging times we live in, when maxing out your credit card is something to group text your friends about (LOL) and when your patriotic duty in an economic crisis is to go out there and FKN-WLL SHOP, religion is seen as a powerful motivation to slough off superfluous needs and ignore various palpably insane social imperatives.

This brings me to Catherine Deveney, whose show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival I stopped by to see last night. Deveney, as I'm sure you already know, is one of the scatological atheist brigade, but before I get to that - a disclosure: I have been an un-fan of Deveney's for many years now - not so much because of what she writes - which is such a stew of smart-arsery and brow-beating that I rarely read it - but because of what she represents: the celebrity columnist, viz. at a once-serious newspaper now determined to turn itself into a super-size Who Weekly, whose fairly unremarkable life and equally unremarkable mind leaves her with nothing much to do in her thrice-weekly columns but talk about herself and aimlessly hang sh*t on people. Her stand-up comedy aside, Deveney's career has essentially been a variation on a theme whose monotonous key notes are filling up column inches and giving readers a sense of social superiority. The idea of the people who commission this stuff seems to be to give The Age's readers the chance to get themselves close enough over breakfast to the source of self-important snark (Deveney), quirky navel-gazing (Marieke Hardy), cosy principled "musings" (Kate Holden) or 2-minute-noodle-style literary knowingness (Shane Maloney), so that they can head out into the world - if not feeling an inner glow, at least feeling forearmed with someone else's ironies. - It's important to bear in mind, by the way, what all this guff - guff that undoubtedly knows it's guff - has come to edge out of the newpaper almost completely - that is, book reviews, film reviews and social criticism that fulfil the minimal criteria of grown-up commentary - talking about the topic for more than three sentences back-to-back and not using the elbow-room that new-style subjectively coloured journalism gives you as a pretext for talking about what bit of obnoxious or poignant behaviour you were witness to last time you were at the supermarket. - That The Age continues to employ Deveney as a tv writer is a sign of the deep downwards spiral it entered into long ago; the abrasive scatter-brained smugness might sometimes be amusing in a column devoted to Catherine's larger-than-life personality, but applied to a medium, tv, that would be well served being written about from a thoughtful informed perspective, it's inexcusable.

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We interrupt transmission to present you posthumously with no less than six epigraphs. Just in case you'd been tempted not to read on by so many preliminaries. . . CS

It is quite possible nowadays to rebel against rebellion by being conventional. Of course this doesn’t mean that all conventionality has just the right mystical rebellious qualities. . . But then how to stand out from the crowd if this is the trick you’re trying to play? That requires imagination. . . - Lion

Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even afraid of them. - Lichtenberg

I flew too close to the sun – on wings of pastrami. - George Costanza

All theology represents an intellectual rationalisation of the possession of sacred values. No science is absolutely free from presuppositions, and no science can prove its fundamental value to the man who rejects these presuppositions. Every theology, however, adds a few specific presuppositions for its work and thus for the justification of its existence. Their meaning and scope vary. Every theology. . . presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable. - Max Weber

Scientific progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualisation which we have been undergoing for thousands of years . . . Let us first clarify what this intellectualist rationalisation, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically. . . Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may “count” on the behaviour of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. When we spend money today I bet that even if there are colleagues of political economy here in the hall, almost every one of them will hold a different answer in readiness to the question: How does it happen that one can buy something for money – sometimes more and sometimes less? The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. . . It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather than one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualisation means. – Max Weber

The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked though to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutations of every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a "meaning" of inner-worldly occurrences. Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power. The extent of consciousness or of consistency in the experience of this contrast, however, varies widely. Athansius won out with his formula [I believe because it is absurd] in his struggle against the majority of the Hellenic philsophers of the time; it does not seem inconceivable, as has been said, that among other reasons he really wanted to compel them expressly to make the intellectual sacrifice and to fix a limit to rational discussion. Soon afterwards, however, the Trinity itself was rationally argued and discussed. - Weber

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All of that said though - there's no denying that the larger-than-life personality does work for Deveney as a stand-up. In her promo material for the Comedy Festival she describes herself as "atheist eye-candy" - which is pretty much the sort of self-admiring tripe that her columns are full of. But when she stalks round on stage in high-heels and a low cut dress and hoots, Tallulah Bankhead style, about being atheist eye-candy she actually makes herself into what she says she is; instead of just writing egomaniacal comic IOU's, she gives herself the chance to play on or against the expectations that come with that sort of sexualised self-presentation. Likewise when she tells us the story of her pre-teen attempts at joining the ranks of Catholic altar boys at the start of God is Bullshit. What did they make her as punishment for even asking? A . . . liturgical dancer: down she goes on bended knee and swirls her arms bizarrely above her head, part matador, part calisthenics teacher - at last she's showing us the stupid side of religion. Or take this development of the show's mainline title:

"George Pell is doing a show at the Comedy Festival did you know? It's called. . . Catherine Deveney is bullshit." 

- a tidy comic one-two that turns her own general offensiveness neatly against itself. (Deveney might have left it that, but she couldn't resist adding in her habitual "Watch me slam dunk these morons" tone: "But at least I fkn exist! Ha!" Of course the joke doesn't work (George Pell isn't God and wouldn't claim to be), but in this case the way she spoils it is itself funny; the frantic self-assertion which is willing to ruin a good line for the sake of hammering home the atheist message itself seems to be being put in inverted commas - for once.)

In general I'd say Deveney is at her best when she's being genuinely self-deprecating - when the atheist posturing and the risqué stage persona can themselves become objects of derision or when the horrors of religion are only incidentally in the picture. Example: The atheist super-celebrity Deveney seems to have a real crush on isn't Richard Dawkins but Christopher Hitchens and, apropos of not very much, she happily recycles one of Hitchen's lesser witticims - that the four most over-rated things in life are lobster, champagne, picnics and anal sex. This gets a bit of a laugh from the audience. But the truly hilarious moment comes later in the show when Deveney has conjured up a picture of Tony Abbott and George Pell in her bedroom, is remonstrating with them to get out and "send Christopher in for some of the four best things." Now I can think of many a female stand-up who would've converted this obscenity into a sultry innuendo - maybe by stopping short and asking with faux-naiveté "Did I really say that?" Deveney doesn't - the idea of sodomy in the middle of the night with Saint Christopher is something she likes as much as a glass of milk before bed-time. Here, I'd say, we have Deveney's most plausible funny-girl persona ("pure as driven slush" as Tallulah B- once said of herself). Boot the church out of the room and the conspicuous lack of sexual embarrassment is authentically funny, the way a lot of dirty jokes can be, in spite of, or because of, how crass and horrible they are. . .

Which is not to say that several of the show's core atheist one-liners, tales or miniature skits weren't genuinely funny or effectively anti-religious either. The best of the lot is the graduated repartée that comes towards the middle of the show ramming home the (historically dubious) atheist line that the time of the Bible's composition was an era of almost total cultural darkness (in lopsided anachronistic terms, an era when psychosis counted as inspiration and absolute authority was the best way of getting your base wishes converted into universal moral imperatives.) Who wrote the Bible? Who wrote the Bible? Deveney asks. (C.f. "Knock, knock") Her answer is that they were a bunch of know-nothings who had the rudimentary advantage over their gullible contemporaries of being functionally literate. Deveney pictures them egging each other on: C'mon, just make something up. No one's going to take it seriously - they can barely scratch themselves, let alone read. Go on - have a fkn stab. 'Ava funken sta-aab. Hm. . . not sure this one quite works on paper, but it does in the flesh. (For the record, the joke has been around since the eighteenth century, when Voltaire achieved notoriety for the quip that if God didn't exist he would need to be invented - and for the first set of modern jokes about the Israelites being a miserable minor tribe wandering round in the desert in more or less total confusion. Deveney's version relies for its effectiveness, however, not so much on the implication that the mental horizons of Biblical writers were limited, but on making the latter sound like classic Aussie knuckleheads.)

As you could probably have guessed, there was a grab-bag of one-liners directed at Tony Abbott and George Pell, the latter of whom Deveney seems to have tried to hoist on the petard of her far from penetrating intellect in the question and answer session after a recent public debate. (Everyone at that little event must have finished believing vividly in hell, as Catherine grabbed the microphone and asked what must surely have been the argument-clinching question - you're a closet authoritarian and a homophobe and a bit of an all-round f*ckwit, aren't you Cardinal?) At Trades Hall we weren't in for that sort of excrutiation - Tony Abbott's head she described rather beautifully as "an urn with ears". His prime virtue is "telling it like it is - in 1372". Either the crowd were convinced Laborites or, more likely, just happy to have a bit of free-floating spite directed by Deveney at the most conspicuous of Australia's political homini relgiosi - but she was on a winner. Your correspondent laughed too - though he did go away thinking that the Abbott jokes would've seemed less predictable if the low-key preachiness of Abbott's political opposite number had come in for a bit of flaming too. It would seem the world has forgotten about all the "light on the hill" stuff that was part of the Kevin07 campaign and the slick Bonhoeffer "think piece" about the importance of taking strong moral stands that The Monthly published in 2007 to smooth the prospective pm's landing on to the tarmac of power politics - both easily as sick-making as Abbott's occasional nods in the direction of his Catholicism.

Deveney's show doesn't fall flat on account of anti-Christian one-liners or atheist set-pieces, but because the one-liners and set-pieces are interspersed - and crowned - with so much comically unreconstructed sermonising. Instead of letting the gags group themselves into some sort of pattern of their own, she breaks them up with tedious didactic repetition of contemporary atheism's main catchcries - "All children are born atheists", "Religion rewards not thinking", "The Bible is a Weapon of Mass Oppression" etc etc etc. If the show has an organising principle, it's the quasi-religious narrative of Deveney's de-conversion from the Irish Catholicism of her younger days - all of it culminating in a daffy mock-ceremony of "de-baptism" including an oath of fealty to "science" and "reason" and Catherine holding out her arms in imitation of the crucified one and having herself tagged as an atheist on forehead, chest and outstretched arms.

Before that we get Epicurus' argument against the existence of a loving omnipotent God - worth repeating in itself because it's one of the greatest atheist arguments of them all:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is not good.
Is he both able and willing?
Then where does evil come from?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"

Having trotted it out, Deveney lets it echo in silence for a couple of seconds. The crowd is justifiably a little awestruck by the elegance and intelligence of the construction. This is the highpoint in the didactic mass de-coversion Deveney was obviously aiming to effect. The equal and opposite lowpoint comes when she ecstatically chants Steven Weinberg's famous throwaway:

"With or without religion you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things, but for good people to do evil things - that takes religion."

Letting itself be gulled by that rather more flimsy question-begging inversion, the audience sighs its collective assent. (Seeing that Deveney seems to mean the point to be taken in all seriousness, let me tediously make the straightforward serious counter-argument that the radical evils committed by, say, the solid citizens of the Nazi Third Reich were not committed in the name of religion, but the result of the transposition of a pseudo-religious style of belief into the domain of secular politics. . .)

The overall message of the show is that if you are an atheist - if you maybe even suspected you've been one all your life in spite of a religious upbringing - then - it's time to come out of the closet, just like Catherine. In other words, the point of it all is to construe the contemporary atheist movement as the next in the series of progressive causes that have included the struggle against racism, sexism, the gay liberation movement, etc. Being an atheist is something to construct a viable identity around - or at least a stage identity - just like Catherine - whatever the overwhelming and abiding stigma attached to doing so might be. Put like that though, you see where Deveney's elementary problem lies. Her argument and her comic atheist persona would make a lot more sense in a world in which there were some sort of palpable social compulsion to live a conventional religious life. But there isn't. If anything there's a whole lot of the opposite. This is not to deny that a modest number of people in today's Australia are subjected to the mind-numbing, emotion-bending rigours of doctrinaire piety and certainly not to deny that many more were subject in the past to far from intellectually sparkling religious versions of mass education. What it does mean though is that the 20-foot high pair of bronzed tits on the billboard down from the cathedral or, for example, the fact that Deveney wouldn't have to swear on The Bible in court, both decisively indicate that we do not live in a society that's close to being governed by medieval religious bigots - and thus not in a society in which the intellectual gesture of anti-religious defiance - and the related provocative-entertaining gesture of anti-religious obscenity - make the sort of sense that Deveney's show depends on them making. To say it again, the default religious position of the vast majority - certainly of under-40's - is a sort of semi-atheist laissez-faire which fades very gradually into a sort of semi-spiritual laissez-faire - i.e. not the sort of thing that all that many people need to be dis-illusioned about on an ongoing basis, unlike Catherine. The God is Bullshit audience is probably as good an indication as any of what's going on out there in general; they're a young-ish crowd who have an acute sense of the ridiculous, but (I'm guessing) little or no idea about Christianity's core teachings and probably minimal really personal experience of religion - even if they did go to church schools. In other words, they're the sort of people it makes no sense to present atheism to as a universalist movement of progressive social dissent, as opposed to something that's good for a laugh. But if that's the case then Deveney begins to seem much more like the purveyor of a niche product rather than the offbeat representative of the generalisable genuinely progressive cause of atheist science (!) and reason (!). When I think of the three people I know who I'd guess she'd bring joy to both as an atheist and as a humorist, they're people just like herself, older Irish ex-Catholics for whom atheism is an active and at times noisy daily struggle against the past. (Everyone over a certain age will recognise the main variations on the theme - the mildly jesuitical impassioned lefty activist and the priestly aesthete for whom being a lapsed Catholic gives the old faith oh so lovely a twist.)

As for Deveney's professed admiration for science and rationality - from the comic point of view, it's simply poison. And from the serious point of view it's so silly that you want to run screaming from the room. Part of the problem is that Deveney can't make science part of the show in anything but a token rhetorical way, can't find an "objective correlative" for it; science and reason, as the abstract entities she wants to rest her case on, are just not easily crossed with Deveney's forceful love of self-exposure; so what we're left with is straight-out pro-scientific ranting - Deveney asking in an excrutiating tone of far too easily assumed moral-intellectual superiority "Why don't these people accept that their stupid beliefs have no foundation in reality? It couldn't be because they're living in some sort of suspended intellectual adolescence which limits their ability of critical thought and rational analysis, could it?" But the other part of the problem, the really serious part of the problem, is that the "scientific" approach to religion that seems to have found its organising vehicle in today's atheist "movement" itself doesn't seem to get intellectually close enough to the phenomena of religion to lay much of a glove on it - even in the case of its most formidable representatives. At their worst, atheist popularisers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens sound as if they think the Christian and Islamic fundamentalism of our day is basically all there is and ever has been to the religious view of the world. And even at its best their thought reveals rather slim acquaintance with the vast array of approaches to the gods that can and should be counted alongside latter-day Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheism. . .

There are two problems here, of great philosophical interest, that Dawkins, as a radical naturalist reductionist, and Hitchens as an all-round intellectual bruiser, sound like they've never heard of, one to do with science, the other relating to reason. The scientific difficulty is that the Dawkins mob don't approach the phenomena of religion with a sympathetic enough spirit to know enough about them objectively (socially, historically, pyschologically). This might seem like a paradox - how could approaching something sympathetically be compatible with a proper scientific methodology which demands strict objectivity - a stern refusal to enter imaginatively into the subjective domain of what you're trying to investigate? Nonetheless it is the paradox of the human or social sciences, which operate quite differently to the natural sciences: the fact is that one can make valid generalisations about history, society and psychology, but only if one does enter - self-critically, interpretatively - into the subjective motivations of historical and social agents. In short, if your natural scientific background pre-disposes you to think of religion as one thing only - in Dawkins' case basically as a quasi-natural expression of animal instincts encapsulating a set of logically demonstrable errors - then scientifically you are taking hold of it by the tail rather than the horns.

The other difficulty, the one I've called a problem of rationality, arises because of a far too narrow identification of science with universal reason - again born out in the work of Dawkins. As the great sociologist Max Weber suggests, religious discourse almost invariably starts out from the non-scientific postulate of the meaningfulness of cosmic and worldly affairs and the particular form a particular belief-system takes depends on how that meaning is systematically rationalised, how the meaning is interpreted "so that it is intellectually conceivable" in spite of the fact that in itself it might be something enigmatic or difficult to talk about. What Weber is getting at is something I'll go into another time, but the general point is this: treating this or that religion as totally irrational, as a one-dimensional phenomenon of total darkness, as out-and-out superstition or nothing but magical hocus-pocus, because it works on different pre-suppositions or uses rationality and subjective experience to different ends is simply no way to understand religion scientifically. As Catherine Deveney herself reminds us in God is Bullshit, you can't be an atheist if you don't understand the Bible - meaning you can't be more than a vulgar atheist or what might be called a stage atheist if you don't understand it. But as Deveney unfortunately also goes on to assert - "no one understands the Bible" (because the Bible is unmitigated bullshit) - which either means that no one's an atheist ("atheists do not exist"?!) - or, more reasonably, that few in the contemporary atheist movement have the nerve, or scientific sophistication, to separate out the different strands of religious thought and experience, the pre-conditions and hermeneutics and consequences of different types of religious thought and experience - and so few if any should be considered anything but vulgar or stage atheists offering scientistic boiled lollies rather than critical scientific analysis of religion. - Of course, Deveney would probably in the end not claim to be anything more than a vulgar or stage-atheist. (Obviously she's frank about being vulgar and stagey - it's not hard to imagine her drawing cocks and balls in texta in hotel Bibles as she says she likes to do.) But my feeling is that because she thinks Dawkins and Hitchens have got the whole religion thing totally nailed, she also thinks that there's a rock-solid foundation to her pliable comic schtick and that the schtick can hence have quite radical social and political consequences. - The schtick, as I've said, is supposed to be a rallying point for the twenty first century fight against violence, racism, sexism and homophobia. Why? Because every page of the Christian Bible is dripping with violence, racism, sexism and homophobia - particularly sexism: Catherine can detect the stink of blokeyness, the oppressive swing of sweaty testicles, in everything from the majestic abstract poetry of the creation story to Jesus' injunction not to resist evil. So the last argument against God - this is the one Deveney I think means least as a joke - is that belief in Him (Her, It, whatever it is) has led to a morally undesirable power imbalance between the sexes. It almost seems unfair to point out that, as arguments go, that one is just not going to make the grade - the evil worldly consequences of a religious belief-system do not count against - or for - its God-posit. The more important point though is that the emancipatory potential of the God is Bullshit approach to religion is zero and its inspirational potential negative because the show depends for most of its comic effect on Deveney's ironic self-spectacularisation - on our identifying with her relentlessly detached gaze and her sense of superiority to the entire religious history and present, and on our willingness to laugh along as she treats manners and mores like so many tiddlywinks to stick down the front of her dress. For a work of art to be inspirational - and most artists, including comics, know this in their bones, so pointing it out is usually superfluous - it has to tragically increase the tension between the ideal and the real - make possible a sort of pathos of distance between what ought to be and what is and hence fill the audience with the emotional or political passion to strive to close the gap. What inspiriting art shouldn't do - and this is why comedy easily gets itself into a mess when it tries to create moral uplift - is bring the ideal back down to the level of unlovely everyday existence, or in other words provide that proverbial "comic relief" for the unfortunate fact that what ought to be and what is are far apart. By this measure, the bits of God is Bullshit where Deveney sets up George Pell or the world of liturgical dancing girls for a pratfall are good standard comic fare. However in the bits where she is denouncing the evils of racism, sexism and homophobia she is - seriously - shooting herself in the foot. And indeed the wider - deeply unfunny - irony of the Deveney show is that, in spite of the furious repetitions of political tropes, as a writer she has actually built a career on refusing the real challenge of politics. Probably no one instantiates The Age's abandonment of social and cultural criticism better than Deveney because no one better embodies the turn back towards journalism as a form of pop-entertainment. And there's the rub. As long as it is practised, as it is today, as a form of mass entertainment, journalism has forfeited all genuine claim to an ethical, political or social point of view and becomes another opiate of the people - and, I might add, a much more powerful opiate than religion itself can ever be nowadays. 

We're back at the beginning. Why does religion continue to exist in the world in spite of the scientific underpinnings of so much of our thinking and action? An answer which applies to the not-so-wealthy parts of the world and which isn't too flattering either to the atheist movement or to the partisans of religious causes is that it speaks to deeply felt human needs. Why it continues to exist in secular societies like Australia is a somewhat different story, but Deveney's show, with all its consciously grotesque tongue-in-cheek, is itself the answer in a way: religion is still seen by many as the solid centre of the seriousness of the world, the expression of what Nietzsche described aptly and not wholly critically as the recurrent human impulse to assert that there are things it should not be permitted to laugh at. Apart from that, in the developed and the developing world, religion continues to rally hearts and minds because it makes metaphysical sense of people's attempts to be good; probably also because it provides people with a sense of connection to the past, or to what counts as the past in all the many corners of the world whose connection with the past has been radically severed in the tremendous historical upheavals of the past 50 - 150 years. In North America, Europe and, locally, on the Pacific Rim, it is still an open question whether a secularism whose foundation is secular rationality . . . is enough to guarantee the long-term existence of a society with any notable ethical orientation. Religious people can be excused for worrying that it isn't enough of a guarantee (and shouldn't be accused of hankering after theocracy just because they do), just as atheists can be excused for wanting to continue the secularist experiment. Atheists and churchy types alike can certainly be excused for worrying that the main institutions of human society that have superceded the powerful pre-modern Church - viz. the state and the market - don't have what it takes to make the secular experiment work. As I've said, neither seems willing or able to supply the humane, all-round, science-based education that would profoundly bolster the operation of secular social rationality - make it into something more than a set of abstract procedures going on above people's heads or a given of the high-tech gadgetry beneath their fingertips - and perhaps in the process give our religiously tone-deaf times a bit more backbone. In the meantime, we have the society of the total spectacle - including Comedy Festival preachers of atheist joke-rationality, like Deveney, and Eastertime preachers of theist pop-psychology like Cardinal Jensen - each delivering veiled or not so veiled insults to each other. The two swirl pungently down the plughole of a questionable late-Western culture. Science, religion and comedy which don't belong on the stage are nowhere in sight.

How unfunny in the end is Catherine D? She reminds me of George Costanza, flying too close to the sun of serious topics on wings of pastrami. She isn't unfunny - she's about as funny as you'd expect someone to be who's trying to funny you into realising the radical political potential of an atheism she herself doesn't know how to take seriously.

April 10, 2010