Damian has come back at me for the parenthetical comment at the end of this post. In doing so he reaffirms that his view of Terry Eagleton's work is more severe than mine is (which is, obviously, fine - as I've already said, he's entitled to his different view), and he also makes it clear that he has neither the time nor the inclination to make any substantive argument on the issue. That's equally fine. I haven't spent too much of my own time promoting Terry Eagleton's work and, even had I done so, Damian is free to dispose of the time he has available for such things in whatever way he chooses.
However, in reaffirming his negative judgement of Eagleton and explaining why he won't be undertaking any supporting demonstration on its behalf, Damian leaves an impression about my viewpoints that I feel I have a right to comment on.
Though not prepared to argue in substance about Eagleton's review of Richard Dawkins that I posted on here, Damian says that he'd 'happily place a bet with [me] on which of the two of them will be considered worth reading in two hundred years' time'. But I won't take the bet, because I have no opinion about this, and it is not even a question that interests me. Damian's offer suggests that I have made some overall adjudication between the work of Eagleton and that of Dawkins when I haven't. All I did in that post was to commend to the readers of my blog three particular themes from Eagleton's review.
Again, damning as he is in his dismissal of the review - 'the witless snobbery and logical incoherence of that review by Eagleton of Dawkins' The God Delusion is one grubby tip of a moraine of pseudo-intellectualizing' - he does not so much as hint at a reason why I should reconsider the three particular points I was recommending it for. Damian isn't obliged to argue if he wishes not to. But I for my part am entitled to point out that I have offered reasons on all these three matters, and so my endorsement of the passages I quote from Eagleton's review is based on having thought about them and not on any speculative forward projection into the remote future of Dawkins' and Eagleton's respective reputations.
Thus, though it has its limitations, I think Marx's famous aphorism about religion expresses something important about the appeal of religion, something which Dawkins and other in-your-face atheists don't always, in their public utterances, make room for. In the post of mine that Damian disagrees with I give links to two earlier posts in which I've written about this.
Then, too, I think Eagleton is right to take issue with the idea that 'no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect'. Why I think so is something I have tried to explain.
And then, three, Eagleton's view, against Dawkins, that there may be benefits that have 'flowed from religious faith' is something to which I've given a fair bit of time and energy - here back then, here just yesterday and elsewhere besides.
So, I am not especially exercised about whether Eagleton's review is the 'grubby tip of a moraine' or even the spat-out remnant of a meringue - I'm interested in the specific points from that review that I was urging upon the readers of my blog. Damian is free to take or leave argument about these matters. But speaking for myself, I won't be persuaded from the opinions that I hold about them by mere pejorative description.
One other point. Damian says that it's 'a credit to [my] intellectual generosity and loyalty' that I forgive Eagleton his errors. Intellectual generosity, where I may have shown it, is not a thing I'd be embarrassed by. But I don't know where loyalty is supposed to come into this. Is there a subtext here - you know, one Marxist to another? If so, you can forget that. By large numbers of Marxists I am no longer regarded as being one, and their attitude to me, as mine to many of them, won't fit at all comfortably under the rubric of loyalty.
But, in any case, which of Eagleton's errors am I supposed to have forgiven? If you search for 'Eagleton' on normblog, what you will find, nearly exclusively, is that I've critically taken issue with him: here (old normblog site, September 7 2003), here, here, here and here. Even in the post in which I express a positive view of his The Meaning of Life - a view I stand by, and will in due course enlarge upon - I put down a reservation about a particular passage. And here again, after quoting a couple of passages that interested me from another of his reviews, I take issue with him. Loyalty? Disloyalty? It has nothing to do with the case. This is the discussion of ideas - in virtually every post I've posted about Terry Eagleton the critical discussion of ideas.
And if in one post, the one that set off the present exchange, I say that he is 'generally better than' a piece in which he charges one writer after another with renegacy because their politics are different from his, that too is an opinion I am willing to stand by.