I’ve been waiting for someone to write a good long piece about the phenomenon that some have named the New Atheism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the disappearance of religion as a cultural force. The article I wanted to read would have less to do with pushing back against the arguments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phenomenon of their collective appearance.

The most obvious question that this imaginary inquiry would tackle would be the question of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once? (more…)

1. Theodor W. Adorno, from “On the Question: ‘What is German?’”

Having said this, I will risk speaking about what facilitated my decision to return. A publisher, incidentally a European immigrant, who was familiar with the German manuscript of Philosophy of New Music, expressed the wish to publish the main section of it in English. He asked me for a rough translation. When he read it, he found that the book, with which he was already familiar, was “badly organized” (schlecht organisiert). I said to myself that, at least in Germany, despite all that has happened there, I would be spared this. A few years later the same thing happened again, only this time grotesquely intensified. I had presented a lecture in the Psychoanalytic Society in San Francisco and given it to their affiliated professional journal for publication. In the galleys I discovered that they had not been satisfied with improving the stylistic deficiencies of an emigrant writer. The entire text had been disfigured beyond recognition, the fundamental intentions could not be recovered. To my polite protest I received the no less polite and regretful explanation, that the journal owes its reputation precisely to its practice of submitting all contributions to such editing (Redaktion). The editing provided the journal with its uniformity; I would only be standing in my own way were I to forego its advantages. Nonetheless I did forego them; today the article can be found in the volume Sociologica II under the title “Die revidierte Psychoanalyse” (”Psychoanalysis Revised”) in a quite faithful German translation. In it one can check whether the text needed to be filtered through a machine, obedient to that almost universal technique of adaptation, reworking, and arranging, to which powerless authors have to submit in America. I give these examples not to complain about the country where I found refuge but to explain clearly why I did not stay. In comparison with the horrors of National Socialism my literary experiences were insignificant bagatelles. But once I had survived, it was certainly excusable that I sought working conditions that would impair my work as little as possible. I was perfectly aware that the autonomy I championed as the unconditional right of the author to determine the integral form of his production had, at the same time, something regressive about it in relation to the highly rationalized commercial exploitation even of spiritual creations. What was being demanded of me was nothing other than the logically consistent application of the laws of highly advanced economic concentration to scholarly and literary products. However, what represents progress according to the standards of adaptation inevitably meant regression according to the standards of the subject matter itself…

2. John Gray, from a review of his new book in The Guardian:

What I learned in writing for the opinion columns is that the reader has no obligation to move from the first sentence to the second or to the third.