Image: Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
When I was in ninth grade, my hippie-dippy English teacher,
fresh out of Clemson University with an English degree and serving in my
underprivileged Low Country South Carolina high school, decided that rather
than having her students read some of the classics of Western literature we
should instead read the novels of the avant-garde, anti-war author Kurt
Vonnegut (1922-2007). This, by the way,
is one of the reasons, my children are homeschooled.
Anyhow, I remember working my way through Vonnegut’s grim Slaughterhouse Five and his
anti-religion Cat’s Cradle and
writing an essay that compared the two works.
I also remember my mother reading over my essay before I turned it in and
taking exception to my quotation of a Vonnegut character’s declaration about
the meaninglessness of existence: “No
damn cat, and no damn cradle.” She was more
worried about the word “damn” in the quote than about the soul-sapping
relativistic nihilism and anti-Christian thrust of Vonnegut’s worldview in his
novels (which she had not read).
I recently picked up a used copy of one of Vonnegut’s last
works: A collection of essays under the
title of A Man Without a Country
(Seven Stories Press, 2005). Written in his 80s, Vonnegut speaks as an
unrepentant socialist and humanist. He demonstrates
special disdain for then President George W. Bush. At one point he even attempts to defend
Marx’s dictum that “religion is the opium of the people.” He observes:
Marx said that back in 1844, when
opium and opium derivates were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they
had given him. He was simply noticing,
and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to
those in economic or social distress. It
was a casual truism, not a dictum (p. 12).
So, I guess Vonnegut believed that Stalin and Mao just misread Marx when they mercilessly cracked down on religious freedom. Hermeneutics is everything, I suppose.
Oddly enough, Vonnegut makes various references to Jesus
throughout the work. At one point he
writes:
How do humanists feel about
Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists
do, “If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what
does it matter if he was God or not?”
But if Christ hadn’t delivered the
Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be
a human being.
I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake
(pp. 80-81).
So, Vonnegut rejects the orthodox Christology of Jesus, while
he admires the ethics of Jesus (as he construes it). Extra ethics, hold the cross and resurrection.
The perfect counterpoint to revisiting Vonnegut has been
reading David Mamet’s The Secret
Knowledge: On the Dismantling of
American Culture (Sentinel, 2011). The
Pulitzer Prize winning Mamet went from being among the confirmed liberal
literary elite to being a staunch cultural and political conservative. Mamet’s political conversion was driven by
his embrace of Judaism. He writes with the
zeal of a convert, noting:
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets
cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude
at little or no cost. Central to this
religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being
attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed (Secret Knowledge, p. 81).
Mamet’s definition of liberalism (humanism) as a religion echoes the
central thesis of Machen’s classic Christianity
and Liberalism (no doubt unintentionally).
One would like to have seen Mamet and Vonnegut duke it out over that
one.
JTR
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