Category: Review

I hugely enjoyed Talal Asad’s Formations Of The Secular, which Eoin O’Mahony has been pressing into my hands since I first met him. It is a worthy ally to Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those books that I suspect I must carefully re-read because even taking close notes, I reckon I got about 30% of what was on offer.

It is probably bad form to use as a quote, something that he quotes but I’ll do it anyway. Footnote 65 on page 47 lets us into a brilliant conversation Asad begins. When I talk with people about secularism, the Christian usually thinks it is about politically laying the ground for mass persecutions to follow and the non-Christian usually thinks it is about fostering reasonable conversation and secure freedom in the face of faith-based irrationalism. Cutting through this shite, Asad asks us (as one of many perplexing and illuminating questions) instead to consider whether pain has a meaning or not. Secularism won the day not when it drove prayer out of schools but when it stripped our owies of certain kinds of metaphysical explanations. Thus:

Their pain became totally secular since pain as well as illness were seen as nature’s punishment for omissions in one’s regimen, while mental illness was perceived as a sign of conflict between the demands of each individual character and the constraints of the social order; this interpretation called for a fundamental social reorganization when its standards (chastity in particular) went against nature. This explains why, as a leitmotiv, the physician of the Enlightenment maintained that in order to be a good moralist, one must first be a good physician, thus reversing the traditional relationship between medicine and morality.

– Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 107.

Your Correspondent, Is off home to think of a lie

My first Margaret Atwood book. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t expect 1984. This is thought provoking novel but it won’t make you feel lovely and gooey inside. In fact, while an interesting proposition, it comes out perhaps as a dull finished product. I’m not saying it needs some ninjas and an alien, but the novel is largely inside someone’s head.

America is taken over by some quasi-Christian cult. Their Ayatollah style regime is obsessed with fertility. The handmaids are women who failed to meet the strict moral regulations and are trained to be nothing more than birthing tanks.

One of the most dreadful passages, in the sense of evoking dread, takes place when the protagonist is out for her daily walk:

At the corner is the store known as Soul Scrolls. It’s a franchise: there are Soul Scrolls in every city center, in every suburb, or so they say. It must make a lot of profit.

The window of Soul Scrolls is shatterproof. Behind it are printout machines, row on row of them; these machines are known as Holy Rollers, but only among us, it’s a disrespectful nickname. What the machines print is prayers, roll upon roll, prayers going out endlessly. They’re ordered by Compuphone, I’ve overheard the Commander’s Wife doing it. Ordering prayers from Soul Scrolls is supposed to be a sign of piety and faithfulness to the regime, so of course the Commanders’ Wives do it a lot. It helps their husbands’ careers.

There are five different prayers: for health, wealth, a death, a birth, a sin. You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then punch in your own number so your account will be debited, and punch in the number of times you want the prayer repeated.

The machines talk as they print out the prayers; if you like, you can go inside and listen to them, the toneless metallic voices repeating the same thing over and over. Once the prayers have been printed out and said, the paper rolls back through another slot and is recycled into fresh paper again. There are no people inside the building: the machines run by themselves. You can’t hear the voices from outside; only a murmur, a hum, like a devout crowd, on its knees.

Your Correspondent, Almost always does a whole-arsed job of it.