I abruptly stopped listening to this episode of Bloggingheads when one of the interlocutors challenged anyone to produce a religious text with the literary quality of Lord of the Rings, “but we don’t carry rings around our necks in memory of Frodo.” Such statements are helpful in identifying one’s self to others as impossible to take seriously, and I was glad that he made it early in the podcast to save me the trouble of listening further. Even to identify Lord of the Rings as a standard-bearer is suspect, when The Hobbit is a better book, but neither approaches Boccaccio, or Dante, or Apuleius. On the other hand, the Gospel of Mark is at least as good as Agamemnon, and Matthew carries Sophoclean overtones in the tragic slaying of his hero. The Sermon on the Mount is among the most beautiful things ever written; the Son of God was no slouch as a poet, it seems. I hereby challenge Bloggingheads to produce a quote as memorable as the bit about motes, beams and eyes.
Broadly speaking, I’ve become impatient of any appeal to false consciousness as explanation for human behavior inconvenient to Marxist thinking. Embrace, ye, that most fundamental of human rights: the right to make yourself useless to your betters. That’s something we can all believe in.
