A Bit of a Rant

Could it be time for a political post? (Preferably random and incoherent!) I see a certain amount of shock and horror being expressed over a Da Vinci parody - not directly, I mean I see a few blogs reacting to the shock and horror over a Da Vinci parody... I mean - I'm not going to read Rod Dreher for love or money.... and with things like this, you can never be sure if there's anyone who's not basically earning a living by Taking Offense who cares a whit. (Or why they'd care, if it wasn't in their job description.) But it reminds me of some things I've been thinking about, so I'll use it as an excuse to gas a bit about religion and art and politics and such...

A first point worth noting is that the inciting poster (Leonardo's last supper enacted by folks in bondage gear) is not, really, parodying or insulting religion - it's parodying The Last Supper: a famous painting, already (as Dan Savage documents) much parodied in the culture. A second point might be that the picture itself is hardly offensive: a bunch of guys and a couple women in leather, maybe a mask or two - whatever. Sure sure, if you want to examine it closely, I'm sure you can find something to be offended at - and I suppose the mere thought of S&M is going to offend some people - again: whatever. Their problem. None of that in the picture. Now I know - the outrage is fake; it's ginned up to justify oppression of homosexuals, and oppression in general - the plain authoritarianism of the right has long since been proven... It's all about establishing the right as the voice of "morality" that it can use to justify its authoritarian politics... It's still worth repeating the point. Noting, again, that the "outrage" is not aimed at anything concrete - not what's in the poster, but the idea behind it: that there might be people who like a good spanking in the world. And probably - the idea that people who like a good spanking now and then might be quite happy and good natured people - since everyone in the picture looks quite satisfied with their lot....

But that's old hat. This is a good excuse to note again that this is Bunuel week - an artist who had great fun mocking religion (as well as the great artworks of our past), including his own Last Supper parody, in Viridiana... as well as more offensive tricks - the ending of L'Age D'Or, with Jesus and disciples in the roles of the libertines of 120 Days of Sodom, is particularly amusing. Which suggests one angle on this latest "controversy" - the fact is, religious imagery is pervasive in western culture: a very high percentage of visual art is religious, is drawn from religious material. Stories, symbols, sayings, language itself, is drawn from or heavily influenced by religious sources. So - anything you do, that addresses the culture - the shared pool of images and ideas and types and so on - is going to refer to religion, somewhere. It can be hard to specify where the lines are drawn: this is a clear example, where a bible story has been adapted into a painting - which has become every bit as pervasive in the culture as the story. But is the painting religion? Is parodying the painting an insult to religion? does it have a thing to do with religion?

There's a broader question here - of what religion is. One thing that sometimes bugs me about radical atheists (like PZ Myers, say - who in fact I quite admire) is their tendency to speak of religion as a single, unitary thing. As if religion was the same as religious belief. It isn't. "Religion" covers a world of things - institutions; beliefs; moral and social rules and precepts; rituals and practices; symbols and images; cultural identities. And it is not religion so much as religionS: they are all different, putting different weight on the various pieces of religion. And many of these aspects of religion are taken over whole by ideologies that get rid of the idea of God: Stalinism, Maoism (so often cited as proof that atheists are Just As Bad as Christians at being murderous bigots), were religions in pretty much everything but the name. Even the central, organizing, imagery - the images of Stalin and Mao - the cult of personality.... (This is of course also the case with perfectly harmless movements.) I am inclined, myself, to think that the unifying principal of religions is their reliance on symbols: religious thought itself is based on taking symbols literally. Religion becomes about the enactment of symbolism - all the rest (the institutions and cultural identities and texts and moral systems) are all extensions of the founding symbols. (That is a reason why things like this story, starting from the idea of a group of atheists trying to come up with a symbol for themselves, seem so profoundly wrong to me. Once you get a symbol for your particular set of views about the world - that sounds like religion to me. In the worst sense, too - of forming gangs, and identifying who is in and who is out. It gives me hives.) If there is a defining religious principal, I would think it is aesthetic: it's taking aesthetics literally.

Okay... I've lost the plot. What does that have to do with an S&M parody of the Last Supper? or the "outrage" it causes? Ah! found it! It's the outrage... The manipulation of the complexity of religion by the profession Takers of Offense. Because: religion is many things - one thing it is is a set of beliefs. As a set of beliefs, there should be no question of the right to ridicule it. Beliefs - religious, philosophical, political, you name it - should be fair game: to argue with, pick apart, mock - there may be better and worse ways of doing it - but arguing with beliefs is as fundamental a right as holding beliefs and expressing them.

But things get complicated with religion. Ridiculing someone for their race is not acceptable, or shouldn't be. Race, ethnicity, culture - you see where this is going? Religion is not just beliefs - it is culture. And charlatans like William Donahue exploit this - they take things that ridicule (or parody or generally question) religious belief, or religious institutions (as political and social forces in the world), or religious symbolism or practices - and treat them as though they were attacks on religion as a cultural identity. But they are not: this is a conflation. That leathermen parody of the Last Supper is not, in any meaningful sense, attacking christian culture - it's not like a blackface version of the last supper would be. It's not. It's not like Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot (as Dreher claims) - it's not. Saying it is is cheating. It's an important point to remember because there are plenty of instances of attacks on religious cultures - much of the anti-Islamic rhetoric in this country is plain bigotry. And certainly when religious beliefs are grounds for discrimination - whether against atheists as in the symbol story linked above, or the not always all that subtle attempts to go after Mitt Romney's Mormonism (from both sides) - that is unacceptable. But those kinds of genuine offenses have to be distinguished from criticism of religious policies, or even mockery of the specifics of religious belief. The Outrage industry turns it all to mush, turns everything into posturing. Bastards.