“Every Artist is a Cannibal, Every Poet is a Thief…”

I hadn’t read anything off of aldaily lately, and wow, there are some curious articles about.  There’s one about Bono at the G8 summit, here’s the argument:

1. Bono’s band is overrated
2. Bono is a self-obsessed pop star
3. Bono acts like he’s an important world leader for his own ego (I can only assume that Angela Merkel rose to the German Chancellorship on an elevator of compassion and charity)
4. Bono pretends to speak for Africa,  but the writer did some research, and it turns out that Bono is Irish
5. Bono portrays Africa as a place that needs a handout when it does not.  The writer doesn’t specify, but it seems to be implied that Bono’s claims about AIDS infection, Denghy Fever, and Malaria are at best overstated and at worst… not even true.
6. Bono cares about poor people but makes a lot of money. One either likes ending Malaria or money, not both.

We are to conclude from the article Bono=Bad.  We are to conclude from Africa policy, the reasonableness of the positions of the G8, and what critical analysis of Africa in terms of its humanitarian status, its political stability, and its future potential security threats to the West that in short… well, that Bono is a preening jerk and can’t be trusted.  Also, I hate to say it, but if you really think that U2’s best album since The Joshua Tree is All That You Can’t Leave Behind, you have NO U2 hating street cred and apparently missed the entire early 90’s when MTV was practically certain to have something from Achtung, Baby!  pretty much every hour.

If only that were the end of it.  But nooo.  I also unfortunately clicked on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s review of The Atheist’s Bible and finally, a New York Times piece hitting Rorty’s “postmodernism.”  The last one actually seems to take on the following narrative structure:

1. I was reading this book about this Brazilian tribe by Levi-Strauss
2.  I heard that Rorty died
3. Rorty believed in a broad relativism, a liberal ironism if you will.
4. These people I’m reading about, they don’t actually practice things that Rorty would approve of, but I think Rorty has to approve of them.
5. Without Natural Law there is only relativism.
6. Therefore Rorty believes chopping peoples heads off is okay.
7. The Brazilians perished because they didn’t procreate much, and they didn’t procreate much because they didn’t have natural law (!?!!?!)
8. This is what will happen to postmodernism too.

To all who still cling to the desperate hope that natural law is either a.) real or b.) important; please note the following.  Atheists, phenemenologists, pragmatists, whatevers, don’t all think that life is meaningless and useless just because there is  no natural law.  We that this is what YOU think already.  If you didn’t already think that, you would not constantly elide the fact that you think natural law is important with evidence that it is in fact real.  However, Rorty’s decision to believe that liberalism is justifiable without natural law has been done very smartly by pragmatists, phenomenologists, absurdists, analytic philosophy, and epistemology.

In the face of all of this work, those who argue such positions are apparently not owed reasons according to the natural law that natural law theorists cling to, because they respond to the attack on their slippery elision by simply repeating it.  At which point the only thing that is apparently natural about the natural law is man’s tendency towards ideology for explanation.

Why not spice it up and respond to your critics like so: “The interpretation of Your Mom as the horizon of every possible attempt to understand Being is its provisional goal.” It has every hint of the reasonableness of your current position, plus its got that modern day, in-your-face attitude of a Robert George or a Roger Scruton.  And if your called juvenile, one can always fall back on that great Orwellian Natural Law move: All can understand some parts of the natural law, but some can understand more parts of the natural law better.  Then simply inform the conversant that you are, in fact, one of those privileged few, and your colleague who is calling you out is simply a sorry simpleton who does not know any better.  Hence anything you say is right, anything that anyone who disagrees says is a Godless, groundless imbecile, because of the rules that are universally true, that I just arbitrarily picked as so.  See.  That would be much more fun than claiming that atheists have no purpose or that Rorty has no justification for his liberalism without consulting their views on such matters.  It would, at least, make links from aldaily more readable.