Religion and (or versus) Quantification

I recently was watching an interview with a well-known woman novelist (Mary Gordon) on a Bill Moyers show. (He’s been doing pieces on faith and reason.) This woman confessed frustration at being stuck between two worlds: fundamentalism and consumerism. I found her views on consumerism the most interesting part of the interview. {Audio of this essay @ 4.8MB .MP3 5 min}

Essentially, she claimed that she’s tired of everything being boiled down to money, that money was the default, great evaluator of things. Here is a quote from that program:

I think most of what I treasure seems very vulnerable to me right now. And it seems vulnerable to me on several different fronts because I think there are two major narratives in the world, the narrative of fundamentalism and the narrative of consumerism. And I think that what I value is threatened by two opposing forces. One, the fundamentalist force, which wants to censor doubt, censor questioning. And one which wants to make everything about money. And one of the most disturbing phenomena in the world as I experience it now is that everything seems to be about money. What can be commodified, what can be sold. The notion that there's never enough money. That greed seems to be okay. That the value of an artistic or a literary production is how many mega bucks it makes. That the value of a vocation seems to be gone. It's what can you do that would make money.[1]

One might consider the specific example of movies, where a “good” movie was one that broke opening day records, or made the most money that year. On the view she loathes, “good” movies are defined in terms of money, and not character development or plot subtlty. This goes to show that society has lost something important about literature and art. Certainly I can see her point. That the recent movie, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest” had an opening day take of $55,830,600, and has grossed $419,866,407 hardly means it will be considered important literature in, say, a century. Yes, it was fun. No, it was not important. On other hand, I think the movie “Schindler's List” will be considered important literature, because it captures something dire and significant about the 20th century. Yet its opening weekend was only $656,636.

Against Ms. Gordon’s point, however, is the whole issue of quantification in assessing some of the big themes of life. Consider, for a moment, Economics. The reason that Economics is so interesting is that it functions as a kind of justification for what we claim to know. Money is a well-understood and convenient tracking unit for how people commit to actions or comment on their own pleasures. Granted, not all pleasure is good, where ‘good’ is being used in the moral sense; for, one can buy heroin, for example, which might bring fantastic pleasure, but which is not a good act, either in terms of virtue, or in terms of long-term advantage to the individual user.

Again, money also tracks people’s wants. Consumerism carries within it the view that people buy things they want, and they indicate the depth of their wants by expenditure of money. Different sub-groups will spend their money differently, and this can be correlated with certain commitments to achieve their goals of acquisition (i.e. to obtain their wants). No doubt, Ms. Gordon would say it's not economics that she's worried about, but something else about consumerism.

I suspect there is a problem with Ms. Gordon's complaint -- one which I see in fundamentalists specifically, which is somewhat ironic, given that she is trying to differentiate herself from fundamentalists; but one which I see in religious people generally: A distrust of quantification in matters of faith.

Overall, justification can be had only with some form of objective quantification. But the essence of religion, at least as a social fact, is about what is subjective – about ‘faith’. Religion functions as a kind of escape from quantification (often appearing in the guise as anti-intellectualism, and in recent days as anti-science). Thus, religious people maintain their position with minimal or no justification at all.

Again, I’m being descriptive in the above argument; I’m making a claim about how religious people are regularly found to operate, not how religion has to be. There are very rational people with very good arguments for why they believe what they do in religious matters, but I just wish it were these rational types that most commonly found among the pious.

I've acknowledge that there are very many religious people in the world, but claim that very few are rationally justified. So I find myself wishing that there were less religious people around. However, perhaps I'm airing an unfair complaint. Consider this analogous argument: There are many musicians in the world, but very few worth listening to. Therefore, I wish there were less musicians in the world. In the musician case, my wish is misplaced. What I really wish is that what musicians there are would be worth listening to. Likewise, I suppose what I really wish is that what religious people there are would be more careful in their reasoning about matters of faith. It is difficult, however, since so very many religious people are not careful at all concerning such matters.


REFERENCES

[1] "Mary Gordon and Colin McGinn" Bill Moyers on faith & Reason (June 30, 2006)

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