Empty Calories, Tasty Snark

I've just finished reading Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Eagleton is a great polemicist, and his prose is elegant and sometimes very funny, but for the most part he seems to replace Dawkins' and Hithchens' lack of theological and historical rigor with his own. That's okay, though. The book is a fast read, and it contains some superb snark. It's like a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos for the soul; it's not very nutritious, or even very filling, but it sure tastes good.

Here's a tasty morsel:

One place where so-called spiritual values, driven from the face of a brutally pragmatic capitalism, have taken refuge is New Ageism, which is just the sort of caricature of the spiritual one would expect a materialistic civilization to produce. Rather as those with hearts of stone tend to weep at schmaltzy music, so those who would not recognize a genuine spiritual value if it fell into their laps tend to see the spiritual as spooky, ethereal, and esoteric . . .

Romanticism, as Marx himself pointed out, is among other things the flip side of utilitarianism. Those who are in every other way worldly, cynical, and hard-boiled (Hollywood superstars and the like) reveal a truly bottomless gullibility when it comes to spirituality. Nobody is more otherworldly than the worldly, nobody more soft-centered than the hard-nosed. Spiritual matters must naturally be as remote from their lawyers, minders, agents, and hairstylists as one could imagine, in order to provide some fantasy alternative to them. This is why people who are in every other respect urbane and streetwise believe that affairs on earth are being controlled from an alien spaceship parked behind a cloud. They would probably not believe this if they had only $38 in the bank. Money is a great breeder of unreality. The idea that spirituality is about visiting the sick and fighting injustice would no doubt strike these Kabbalists, necromancers, and chiropractors of the psyche as intolerably prosaic. Even their minders and hairstylists can do that.