Idiot Joy Showland

I don’t blame PZ Myers for not liking me; if I were him I wouldn’t like me either. Myers is a grown adult and an associate professor of biology at UM Morris, best known for not believing in God, for refusing to condemn bestiality, and for a 2008 stunt in which he desecrated a Communion host along with some pages from the Qu’ran. He runs a blog, Pharyngula, which he disconcertingly describes as ‘random ejaculations from a godless liberal.’ (It’s not inaccurate – his daily rants do elicit that same combination of pity and disgust as the sight of someone rubbing one out in public.) If I’m honest, Myers first came to my attention when he wrote a brief response to my unfair and uncharitable hitpiece on Neil deGrasse Tyson, describing me as ‘an anti-intellectual reverse-snob — he thinks he should be proud of being so blatantly pro-mystery and anti-science,’ an epithet so apt I had to put it on my masthead. More recently, he’s taken exception to my essay on the general intellectual tenor of the atheist movement in the Baffler, writing a counterblast titled ‘Sam Kriss, master of projection.’ I’m not surprised; I struck first. The essay itself isn’t really original; nothing ever is: the core argument is for the most part a recapitulation of Max Horkheimer’s critique in Theism and Atheism, inflected with Kierkegaard, my own non-invidious alethiology, and vitriol. It’s the vitriol that Myers seems to be most upset by – which is strange, as he’s certainly capable of dishing it out. In my introductory paragraph I run through a couple of atheism’s leading lights, and the sheer strangeness of their behaviour. Richard Dawkins, for instance, is ‘a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism.’ Chris Hitchens, ‘blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.’ And Myers I describe as ‘psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon.’

‘Well, actually…’ he writes. His whole ideology can be contained in that ‘well, actually.’ I’m not really all that interested here in defending the substance of my essay from Myers’s counterarguments, such as they are; it can stand for itself. His invocation of projection, pointing out that I ascribe various degrees of madness to all these prominent atheists while at the same time coming across a little unhinged myself, mostly just shows that he doesn’t really get it. I’ll only note that it’s interesting to see, after having routinely criticised atheism for being dismally pedantic – blind to metaphor and nuance, relentlessly fixated on the stupid binary of true and false, seized with the monstrous idea that the best statement is one which blithely repeats an existing state of affairs and does no more – that both Myers and his readership are utterly baffled by my comment on Hitchens. ‘It wasn’t a fug that killed him,’ Myers writes, ‘or even his own rhetoric, but cancer.’ Well, shit. One Owlmirror speculates: ‘Did Hitchens at some point literally fall in the Euphrates? I mean, he was a journalist in the right area… Or could it be a convoluted reference to Hitchens’ fondness for whiskey?’ Another wonders if I’m ‘somehow referring to Euphrates the Stoic.’ I’ll leave them to work it out; what I really want to zero in on is Myers’s response to my characterisation of himself. He writes: ‘Again, “screeching death” is also terribly inapt, and why has he put me in a hot air balloon?’

It’s usually bad form to explain your own metaphors; as well as resolving the meaning of a text back to boring old authorial intention, it strips away all the indeterminacy that makes a metaphor interesting in the first place. If you can cut through the metaphor and explain what you mean without any damage to that meaning, you should have just said what you meant in the first place. But this is a special case; the object of the metaphor is himself demanding to know why he’s in a hot air balloon, and it wouldn’t be fair to trap someone in a basket high above the earth without at least telling them why. So I’ll give PZ Myers the explanation I owe him. This is why I put him in a hot air balloon.

1. It’s funny. No man is more ridiculous than the one trapped in a gently listing hot air balloon, and PZ Myers has been trapped in a gently listing hot air balloon all his life. The man has a fairly round head, its taper towards the chin smoothed out by that odobenine beard; his body seems to dangle from the rising roundness of his head. All I did was put him next to a mirror of himself. As I cut the ropes and the hot air balloon started to wobble towards the heavens his big round head wobbled too, poking out from over the lip of the basket, demanding that I let him down at once. But it was too late. Even if I’d wanted to, there was nothing I could do to save him: PZ Myers and his balloon were already high above me, diminishing into the sky’s glittering haze, bloating upwards to a higher truth, to punch the face of God.
2. Atheism, of the type I describe in the Baffler piece, could be considered as a form of helplessness before the facts. The highest endeavour of humanity is to catalogue all the stupid details of our physical universe, to ingest them and then barf them out again; the human being is just a mechanism by which the universe repeats itself, for no good reason. We are not active, we do not form our own world; any attempt to do so is denounced as superstition and untruth. Atheists always love to present their interventions as being exceptionally brave, personal conscience against the follies of society, but in fact it’s hard to conceive of an ideology that’s more thoroughly passive. To give him his due, Myers distinguishes himself from some of his contemporaries with a stated commitment to social change; he’s broadly pro-feminist, he supports LGBT+ struggles, and so on, like so many social liberals he is at least opposed to the more morbid symptoms of the disease – but all this, as his response shows, remains in the context of that same godawful pedantry. His arguments for egalitarianism are epistemological arguments; like so many liberal Aufklärer he considers social justice to follow from the brute facts, rather than as something that seeks to abolish them. In other words, we are in the hot air balloon, knocked about by the winds, unable to steer our own course; all we can do is embrace the jetstreams as they knock our big blobby heads across the skies, because if nothing else they are at least factually true. Myers roars his power and indignation, and all the while his balloon tilts onwards to nowhere.
3. Consider the loneliness of the man in the hot air balloon. Up on his lonely rootless perch all other figures slowly melt into their backdrop. Houses fade into cities, cities fade into a fuzzy urban smudge; above a certain height, even the birds will no longer visit him. The gaze of scientific rationality is abstract and disembodied; it sees the world of facts spread out beneath it, and knows that it can never come back down. PZ Myers is a monad. Like all dogmas atheism has its schisms and its cleavages, but Myers has managed to utterly alienate himself from his co-religionists: he’s disliked by the bigoted, bellicose contingent because of his attempts to disown the nerd misogyny and the general unpleasantness that surrounds organised atheism; he’s disliked by the social-justice contingent for his furious outbursts, his bloodthirstiness, his malice, his badly cloaked self-regard, his bellicose bigotry. PZ Myers fell into the sky. You can see him sometimes, on a clear day; a tiny dot hovering by the edge of a faded afternoon moon, his screams unheard, the ruler of his pelagic isolation.
4. In 2008, the Brazilian priest Adelir Antônio de Carli died in a cluster ballooning accident. De Carli was a champion of the poor and destitute in his city of Paranaguá, defending beggars against police violence; he regularly carried out similar stunts to raise money for local charities. On his last balloon flight, de Carli found himself floating out over the ocean, where he lost contact with his ground team; months later, his body was found near an offshore oil rig. PZ Myer’s response was sheer gruesome delight; his only concern was that more priests weren’t dying thousands of miles from the ground. ‘I am imagining a day,’ he wrote, ‘when every priest in the world stands smiling beneath a great happy bobbing collection of many-colored balloons, and they all joyously loft themselves up, up into the sky, joyfully drifting away before the winds until they are just a tiny speck and then … gone.’ (This is a minor quibble, next to the sheer monstrosity of his fantasies, but nobody who uses ‘joyously’ and ‘joyfully’ in the same sentence should ever think of criticising someone else’s writing.) PZ Myers dreams of massacring Latin American Catholic priests, shooting them down with ‘an ultralight aircraft and a BB gun’; he dreams with the Escuadrón de la Muerte; it was only right that someone should put him in a balloon all for himself.
5. He was rude to Tami, which is unforgivable.
6. PZ Myers struggled at first, when I put him in the hot air balloon. All the usual complaints: no, I don’t want to go, don’t put me in there, I don’t like it. But he settled down once it started to rise; whatever the indignity, it’s fun to go on a hot air balloon ride – even if you are alone, even if you can never come back down. I put him there because I could, and he stayed there because that hot air balloon is where he’s always belonged.

The fossil later received £250,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

Richard Dawkins wakes some time before dawn. He doesn’t blink or yawn or stretch – his eyes clang open with all the force and suddenness of a steel door. He stares at his ceiling, blue and brown swirling in his irises like cars and livestock in the centre of a tornado. Richard Dawkins’ head is fizzing with mad thoughts. He chatters under his breath as he strides out of bed and down the stairs of his Oxford home. His wife gives a small grunt and goes back to sleep. Outside a shimmering band of turquoise near the horizon brings a soft sparkle to the beads of dew hanging from trees in early bud; the heavy clouds in the distance look peach-pink and insubstantial; so do the old pale brick houses that line his street. The birds are singing in riotous chorus. “Accept my genetic information, females of my species!” they sing. “Observe my superior fitness for survival, as evidenced by the strength and clarity of my voice! Oh, and, by the way, as a bird I have no concept of God or metaphysics, but I do believe in strict gender roles and the principles of Aufklärung!” Richard Dawkins sets off into the world.

As he shambles down his street a few small birds burst from a shrub, scattering at his approach. The famous scientist suddenly breaks from his mutterings and watches them carefully. “Horses!” he says, finally. “Flying horses. Nonsense. Balderdash. Not now. Not yet. One day. Tiny flying horses, tiny flying horses, millions of tiny flying horses. One day. One day.” Later, an upended bin gives the bestselling biologist some cause for reflection. Foxes have tipped it over, sprawling its contents over the pavement. “Hitler’s brain!” Dawkins exclaims. “Save Hitler’s brain, study Hitler’s brain, gain Hitler knowledge. Hitler science. Science Hitler. Hitler Hitler.” Soon he is heading down from his wealthy suburb into the medieval heart of Oxford, towards the University, seat of learning and discovery for over nine hundred years. A few vans making early-morning deliveries trundle past him. He smiles and waves. “You want to see some films of a lady giving birth?” he shouts happily. “Fantastic stuff. Two million years old. Baby porn, baby.” By the time he’s on Market Street the sky has lightened and there are already a few pedestrians on the road – postgrad students with their morning coffees, undergraduates still stumbling home from the previous night. Some stare as he passes; some turn their backs. Suddenly, Richard Dawkins stops dead. He raises an accusatory finger at a horrific building standing in front of him. His face is twisted in fury. It’s not a church, though – it’s a charity shop. “WHERE DO AMPUTEES BUY THEIR SHOES?” the internationally renown secularist bellows, spitting and grimacing, tears rolling down his face. “DO AMPUTEES THROW AWAY ONE SHOE?”

His journey is almost complete. As the sun, burning with nuclear fusion’s blasphemous glory, begins to float above the crenelated urban horizon, Richard Dawkins is climbing Magdalen Tower. Finally he is at the summit, surrounded by its magnificent Gothic spires. As dawn becomes day, Richard Dawkins looks out at a gloriously mechanistic universe, and begins to laugh. “There is no God!” he shouts. “There is no God! There is no God!” As he does so, his testicles sway freely in the breeze, swinging slowly, with all the dignified solemnity of old church bells.

~

Richard Dawkins has gone insane.

It’s probably for the best. In his more lucid moments his proclamations tend towards an unselfconscious misogyny and Islamophobia – his thought bears the ugly stamp of the bigot who thinks that not believing in God lends his opinions some kind of Rational Objectivity. His links with the far right are extensive; it might not be a coincidence that his personal foundation shares a logo with the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Far better for him to be endlessly wittering about Pleistocene porn and Hitler’s brain. I’d like to think I helped in some small way: I am, after all, one of the voices that reminds him daily of an inconvenient truth. But really it was inevitable; it’s inscribed in his ideology. The ‘New Atheists’ should, I think, more properly be called the New Young Hegelians; much of their bad politics comes from their refusal to accept that their ideas were thoroughly refuted by a pair of bearded weirdos over 150 years ago. This is aggravating enough, but the madness comes in when their insistence on rationality turns from an irritating ideological quirk into a full-blown psychosis. You can’t talk to these people. “I prefer tangerines to oranges,” I say. “I’ll believe that when I see the proof,” they thunder in response, glutamated granules falling from their beards like dandruff as they shake their heads in scorn. “Maybe the juridical categories of proof and evidence aren’t universally applicable?” I suggest. The whining chorus: “Got any evidence for that?” Wander too far down the path of rationalist dogma and it’ll be no surprise if you’ll end up like Richard Dawkins, sunning his genitals in a world that no longer makes any sense.

But what if it’s something more? What if Richard Dawkins’ madness isn’t the end of his story, but the start of his elevation to something entirely different?

~

Richard Dawkins is not new. Richard Dawkins has been with us for thousands of years. Xanthus of Lydia writes of the presocratic philosopher Empedocles:

Having reached the summit of Etna, he threw himself into the flames, believing that with the scourging of his body by the fire he would arise as a god. From that day he was known to the people as Μαργίτηἅγιοσ (Margithagios).

What is a margithagios? The word recurs several times in Greek writing without much in the way of elucidation. In Latin it was translated as furiosus sanctum, or the holy madman: the Roman jurist Sextus Pomponius wrote that ‘the holy madman is he who, having been a great man, places himself by his own will beyond the limit of the law and its reason. Thereafter he is the property of the gods; he is theirs to kill or take in sacrifice.’ That the gods will claim their sacrifice seems to be a given. Of the individuals later described as margithagies or furiosi sancti, few tend to meet a peaceful end. The fourteenth-century German theologian Thomas von Klöt was born to an aristocratic family but renounced his worldly wealth in the service of the Church; he was at one point considered a candidate for posthumous canonisation. However, his preaching became steadily more bizarre and began to verge on the blasphemous: he began to insist that God manifested Himself in vegetable life and forbade his followers to eat any plants or anything which fed on them (flies, worms, etc were at the time believed to emerge through spontaneous generation and were therefore considered safe to eat). He was killed with two of his disciples when he was crushed by a falling tree. Comte Xavier de Mazan, commonly considered to be an inspiration for the Marquis de Sade, took to calling himself Priapus Invictus and walking around Paris in specially designed breeches that allowed his penis to protrude through an opening surrounded by rubies and sapphires; he died in 1761 when an improperly cut diamond tore through his femoral artery. At the close of the nineteenth century, the British imperialist and industrial magnate Harry Suggle began to take an interest in Hindu cosmology and eventually proclaimed himself Īshvara, the supreme ruler of Vyāvahārika or the World Inside the Veil, to a crowd of his workers. He was killed when a rotary blade in his beet-processing factory came loose and sheared off the top of his head.

A general theory of margithagies was first devised by the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his 1972 work Les Hommes à l’extérieur. Lévi-Strauss connected the figure of the margithagios with the Outside Men of Amerindian society – those madmen who, unlike prophets or shamans, would live within the camp but not take part in its rites. The position of the Outside Man was an ambiguous one: at once man, god, and beast. In times of grave general danger (such as drought or war), the holy madman would be ritually sacrificed; however once the rite was carried out it was forbidden to speak of it on pain of death. Perhaps the most systematic analysis of the sacred madman, however, is in Giorgio Agamben’s 1996 Margithagios: Dissent and despotism from the classical to the modern. Agamben argues that the margithagios formed a ‘state of exception’ allowing ancient societies to allow for dissenting or contradictory opinion to be at once openly expressed and rejected as madness (and potentially cut short with the life of the holy madman). In his conclusion, Agamben explicitly identifies the margithagios with freedom of speech in liberal democracy, proclaiming that ‘in the twenty-first century, we will all be furiosi sancti.’ Notably, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the holy madman in Plateau 10 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

We refer not to prophets or seers, molar aggregates all, but the margithagios, for whom the revelation is always a becoming: becoming-God, becoming-flames, becoming-ashes. Can we say with certitude that Empedocles did not, in the end, adopt the trajectories of an Apollo? In the margithagios space becomes a field of n points, n-dimensional movements, intersected by n plan(e)s. Margithagios haecceities form lines of flight extending in every dimension, the contagion of the sacred madman is effected through these backchannels, in which deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation form a loop or sequence connected not by graduation but consistency. There is never a city, there is only a city and a volcano, never a volcano, only a volcano and a sandal, never a sandal, only a sandal and a god. Rhizome.

The theoretical margithagios is diverting, but you get the sense that Deleuze and Guattari have missed the point a little. The holy madmen existed. For a short time they transcended our world while continuing to walk within it, and then they all fell. They were sacred to something. Something took them back to itself, something greater and more powerful than we can imagine. As he babbles about tiny flying horses and people with more shoes than legs, a question is forced upon us – is Richard Dawkins about to prove the existence of God?

~

Richard Dawkins stands on the top of Magdalen Tower. The sun is rising over Oxford. The fires of Etna shine their feverish light over his naked body. He smiles.