While reading the LA Times website the other day, I happened to click over to a post entitled “Michele Bachmann is Worried About the Renaissance”. The gist of the piece (unattributed, in the Culture Monster section) is that we should all fear and deride Michele Bachmann because she is a fan of certain radical Christian thinkers who argue that Christian society began to fall during and after the humanistic Florentine Renaissance.
Now, I support the author’s right to dislike Michele Bachmann, and I also believe that the Renaissance was a good thing (much, much better for humankind than the Enlightenment was, for instance). But I am troubled by the tone of the post and by its faulty logic.
Throughout the piece, the author seems content to replace argument with personal attacks, writing such lines as “This art-historical drivel first saw print in…”, “The cover of Pearcey’s kooky cultural treatise…”, and “Darn that Enlightenment! Next thing you know it will be birthing truly dangerous ideas, like secular democracy.” Jocularity aside, this is not argument.
The author of the post, rather than arguing against Bachmann or attempting to present evidence to show the irrationality of her beliefs, is content to resort to veiled ad hominen arguments and a general feeling of superior intellectual outrage. She (the author, that is) is missing an important point: that to a medieval christian, hatred of the Renaissance might very well be in character. It did destroy many of the foundations of the church order at the time, and set about weakening it — a process that has still continued to this day. For a person that legitimately regarded God as the guiding force in existence, the destruction of the church would have been a terrible thing.
But that’s not really the point. The crux of the matter is why the author can’t, or won’t, look at Mrs. Bachmann’s motivations. Since Mrs. Bachmann is obviously not a medieval christian, why should she believe in an essentially medieval doctrine?
The tempting response — and the one that this blogger seems unconsciously to agree with — is that Mrs. Bachmann is just crazy, but that is dismissive and does not help. Another possibility is that she is cynical and hypocritical, merely presenting a facade of fundamentalism in order to appeal to christian voters. However, her apparently complete personal committment to her faith makes that unlikely.
I think that the truth is that Mrs. Bachmann feels that something is very wrong with the world, and that this is her way of understanding it: that we are all bad Christians, so God has left us alone. What the post’s author flippantly refers to as “secular democracy” is almost certainly, in Bachmann’s eyes, something else. Perhaps it is a consumerist plutocracy, where people struggle to find true meaning under the mass of cheap images and exploitative ideas they are force-fed. I can’t say for sure because I neither know her mind, nor have even a passing familiarity with the fundamentalist christian mindset. But I am sure that she sees the world as Godless and lost. For her to look outside the mainstream for answers is natural.
The author cannot or will not see that, cannot acknowledge Mrs. Bachmann as a human being. That someone who supposedly defends the humanist Renaissance should do so is intensely ironic. Invoking an essentially Christian idea of evil, she labels Mrs. Bachmann and discounts her. The author unfortunately takes a stance too commonly associated with a lack of good argument: refusing to acknowledge the other side because it is unorthodox. She equates art history with Art History, as if there can be only one, inevitable, interpretation of how aesthetic representation developed in Europe over the last several centuries. This is cultural chauvinism at its purest, again ironic that it should come from the mouth of one supposedly defending humanism, secularity, and democratic values.
I am not sure whether the author does so because she is frantically defending the status quo and does not wish to discuss the possibility that anyone, even Michele Bachmann, might find it broken and wanting. Perhaps, on the other hand, she has simply reached a point of ideological rigidity, where she must blame the Right for everything that is wrong, and view them as an evil force from another dimension. Either way, she has abandoned her ability to reason and reflect, and that is not good.
Given the choice between Michele Bachmann, whose views I find abhorrent, but who seems at least to engage with the world though it be to ends I disagree with, and the author of the post, who, though seemingly quite sane, is content to sit back and, almost bureaucratically, pass judgement on all that she regards as different, I can’t say which is worse.
While reading the LA Times website the other day, I happened to click over to a post entitled \"Michele Bachmann is Worried About the Renaissance\". The gist of the piece (unattributed, in the Culture Monster section) is that we should all fear and deride Michele Bachmann because she is a fan of certain radical ...
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