i've been giving the new U2 album, no line on the horizon, a lot of listens lately and some reflections on at least one of its tracks is the occasion for this post.
before getting to that, however, i should note that i've been a longtime fan of U2, beginning way back with their third album, war. unlike some i know (see the blog, my morning song, for instance), i do not lack objectivity when it comes to the lads from dublin. in fact i've been pretty critical of a few of their offerings in recent years. all that you can't leave behind was barely worth the three or so tunes that keep it (barely) afloat; how to dismantle an atomic bomb was better, but, to my ears, hasn't held up especially well -- as an album, anyway. having said that, i like the new album a lot, and have a hunch it will hold up well over time. whether or not it actually does, there are a handful of masterful cuts on there that most certainly will be in steady rotation for years to come.
one tune, which, ironically, i suspect is not likely to age well is on the back half of the album. it's a tune called stand up comedy, and will be my focus in what follows. in a nutshell, what i want to offer here is the suggestion that U2 - or bono, at any rate - is presenting a rather deweyan view of religion in this song.
in a common faith, dewey makes a distinction between "religion, a religion, and the religious; between anything that may be denoted by a noun substantive and the quality of experience that is designated by an adjective." moreover, he links religion to the supernatural. by contrast, as is clear even from his framing of the religion/religious distinction, the religious is a matter of quality of experience, and thus implicitly non-supernatural. more precisely and directly put, religion is the realm of supernaturalism, whereas the religious corresponds to naturalism. dewey's project in a common faith is to offer an argument for the naturalization of supernaturalism. though the argument is executed in typical deweyan fashion - focused on the intelligent development of ideal ends which guide conduct - in this respect, dewey stands in a long western tradition of the atheologization of religion. his reasons for advocating this shift are not entirely dissimilar from the run-of-the-mill criticisms of organized religion from thinkers as far apart as kant and derrida, insofar as the widespread historical tendency toward discrimination, marginalization, and violence is part of his focus. yet these are not his core concerns. rather, dewey's primary worry is procedural in nature. because religion also signifies a special body of beliefs centering on a supernatural being, the result, whether such was the intent of the abrahams, jesuses, mohammeds or not, has come to be that control of human conduct is in the hands of "madcap ghosts or sheer power."
the religious, on the other hand, denotes nothing that can exist by itself, and from this it follows that those who would make out of the religious a specific kind of experience unto itself also get it wrong. the religious is not a separate kind of experience set off from scientific, political, or communal experience. rather, much like the aesthetic and the moral, the religious is an attitude which may enliven and enrich any experience, for it is an attitude which may be taken toward virtually any object and any experience. in other words, the religious may belong to all sorts of experiences, but it cannot exist as an isolated and unique kind of experience. the religious is in and of experience, not separate from it in some detached, supernatural realm of madcap ghosts. according to dewey, the religious quality in experience comes in at the level of effects or consequences; "better adjustment in life and its conditions" is the criterion. nevertheless, dewey does not deny that experience of religion may also be religious; he simply denies that it is commonly religious anymore. there is simply too much evidence to the contrary.
in a sense, the point is to repent of belief and (re)turn to faith, genuine faith. the former is bound up with truth claims and knowledge whereas for the latter uncertainty is utterly definitive. as dewey observes, "there is a difference between belief that is a conviction that some end should be supreme over conduct, and belief that some object or being exists as a truth for the intellect. conviction in the moral sense signifies being conquered, vanquished, in our active nature by an ideal end; it signifies its rightful claim over our desires and purposes. such acknowledgement is practical, not primarily intellectual. it goes beyond evidence that can be presented to any possible observer." this is precisely why "the authority of an ideal over choice and conduct is the authority of an ideal, not of a fact, of a truth guaranteed to intellect."
now, all of that is a long distance to travel in order to set up the punch line, but here it comes. in light of the deweyan backdrop, with its emphasis on the practical over the intellectual; of uncertainty over knowledge; of concrete betterment over propositional assent; of the ideal over the actual, consider the following lines from u2's stand up comedy:
i can stand up
for faith, hope, love
while i'm getting over certainty
stop helping god across the road
like a little old lady
i would like to submit that bono here offers a common faith of his own; the call to get over certainty on its own aligns him with dewey. i love the image of helping god across the road, as though, if s/he were god, s/he would need it. and yet, that is precisely what the epistemology of religion tends to do. god has not made her- or himself certain, and so mind-bending theological gymnastics are undertaken to do the job, and thereafter god can be taken as an object of intellectual truth. but of course once this has been done on god's behalf, those who have done it necessarily gain a measure of superiority; they can claim responsibility for having gotten god across the road, for having rescued the infirm old gal/guy. in stark juxtaposition to all this nonsense, bono privileges the practical (i can stand up) over the intellectual, and the commitment to the ideal (hope, love) over the actual, and moreover, does so with no strings attached, with no attendant triumphalism and no claims to security. i dare say this song is religious, in the deweyan sense of that term.
in an age with a distinct preference for narrow paths, what makes for the genuinely narrow path is how astonishingly broad it turns out to be; those who travel upon it may actually have to share it with others radically unlike themselves.
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