Philosophy

War, on a sudden, and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals – no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortune seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action! The flock are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husband-man butchered, villas and villages burnt – cities and states, that have been ages rising to their flourishing state, subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war. So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good; of destroying than of building!

Any summary of Clive Hamilton’s contributions to public debate thus far would focus on two themes: his savage criticism of modern society and its ‘fetish for growth’; and his rejection of contemporary politics, in particular the theory and practice of social democracy. He sees the implicit faith in growth and markets, and the avoidance of a realistic analysis of power, combining to ensure that modern politics is ineffective in tackling the causes and consequences of the contemporary epidemic of unhappiness.

‘This book is a celebration of art that doubles as a critique of religion,’ writes Peter Conrad in the introduction to this enormous book. Neither aim is especially unusual, but their ambitious fusion here creates a questing mesh of narratives, huge in scope, in which architecture, music, literature, drama, motion pictures, poetry and philosophy in many schools and eras are gathered under the sprawling rubric of art, and no religious tradition is excluded. At times it feels as if you are reading a book about everything, and its restlessness carries you through thirty-three extremely solid, occasionally indigestible chapters, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

That scourge of religion, Richard Dawkins, declared recently that the past year had been a bad one for God. He was probably referring to the success of his polemics against religion and to the tidal wave of kindred writings by other public intellectuals, such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. We do not know whether God would agree; and whether we should agree depends partly on how we read ‘success’. The books certainly sold and are widely acclaimed, and may even have garnered apostates. But for all their élan and entertainment, they are essentially concoctions and elaborations of arguments and observations made by earlier, more penetrating thinkers. If advancing understanding is at issue, as opposed to securing the public’s mobile attention, then we should judge that the tree of knowledge hasn’t burgeoned much lately, not on the theological branches, anyway.

Travellers who go to Beijing usually visit the Great Wall. Along the way the government tour operators often take them to the Ming tombs, the final resting place of thirteen of the sixteen emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), three of which are now open to the public. The underground mausoleums have been cleared of all the grave goods and works of art that were set there to accompany the dead.

Shakespeare the Thinking is the final and posthumously published book of the Oxford critic A.D. Nuttall, who died unexpectedly in January 2007. Pitched at a wider readership than most of his earlier writings, the book is the culmination of Nuttall’s lifetime thinking about Shakespeare, and the work by which his remarkable originality as a critic will no doubt be most widely recognised.

The only salutary effect, it seems to me, of the evolution of religious fundamentalism over recent decades is the current reaction of some scientists, philosophers and public intellectuals. Since the end or the Enlightenment, interest in reasoned polemic against religion (which excludes communist attempts to extirpate it) has largely waned, possibly on the false supposition that the quarry had been mortally wounded. But the emergence of ruthless Islamist ambitions and terrorism, and the malign influence of elements of the Christian right and of right-wing Jewish groups, especially in George W. Bush’s America, appear at last to have spurred intellectuals to produce books and documentaries, to confer and to organise, to engage in resistance to what is rightly perceived as a religious assault on reason and liberal values, as the dying of secular light. The most prominent of the current critics are the philosophers Daniel Dennett and Michel Onfray, the biologist Richard Dawkins and the versatile Christopher Hitchens.

Late in in the thirteenth century, Alfonso X (‘The Wise’), king of Castille, declared: ‘If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.’ He raised a storm. That wickedness, natural disaster and the inexorable corruption of things filled the world with suffering had hardly gone unnoticed, of course. Theologians had long sought to reconcile the existence of evil with God’s omnipotence and benevolence. But Alfonso reanimated a worm in the heart of reason: the suspicion that, really, God could have done better.

One stock form of biography is attempting the rehabilitation or revision of a character whose reputation seems well settles. In theory, the most challenging of such projects is that of returning the Devil, otherwise known as Lucifer or Satan, from the lowest circle of human estimation to a more sympathetic or nuanced position. With a tip of the hat to Jack Miles’s God: A Biography (1995), Henry Ansgar Kelly constructs a diabolical life of sorts, retracing the idea of Satan across the centuries from ancient Israel to contemporary Catholicism. This is partly a popularising presentation of scholarly research on an idea and its variations, and partly the outworking of the attractive conceit, borrowed from Miles, that behind the pages of scriptural and apocryphal material lies the development of a real character.