Restating the Obvious

Book Review XXIII: Descartes' Bones

This is another of the books I'm reading for Amazon's Vine program. It's no good, and I wasn't going to bother with it on Restating the Obvious, except that toward the end Shorto falls into a very dangerous trap.

Since he's not alone, it seemed worth recording.

DESCARTES' BONES: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason, by Russell Shorto. 286 pages. Doubleday, $26

The pun on skeletal in the subtitle works against author Russell Shorto; "Descartes’ Bones” really is a very thin book.

Two thin books, which are intended to twine around and support each other but instead drag each other down.

The premise, widely accepted but incorrect, is that modernity began with Rene Descartes’ “Discourse on Method,” thus setting off the continuing controversy between faith and reason as the organizing principle by which we assess our surroundings.

This dispute was old in the 1630s, and if any one man could be said to have initiated modernism, it was Lorenzo Valla, who in the 1440s had shown that appeals to authority could not be trusted. (The faith-based community has never forgiven him, either. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that, “like all Humanists, he lacked firmness of character.”)

However, no one would dispute the influence of the Discourse, which self-consciously expanded the explicit critical theory of Valla from texts to the universe.

Shorto doesn’t waste any ink on Descartes’ ideas. Something less than 20 pages suffice for both his biography and his thought, not leaving even a sentence for his physics of vortices.

It is clear why Shorto wants to avoid vortices. His Descartes explained everything from evidence, starting with the only thing he thought he could be sure of: I think, therefore I am. However, the real Descartes was (at times) an ungrounded speculator. His airy theory of the vortex was not based on any physical evidence.

Having disposed of Descartes, body and soul, Shorto rushes along, occasionally stopping to mention one of the rearguard actions of the faction devoted to faith and authority and against individual autonomy and science. If you already know some of this, you won’t be further enlightened. If, somehow, you don’t, you will be just puzzled.

The other book traces the history of Descartes’ earthly remains. Descartes considered himself a good Catholic, although his philosophy was corrosive of churchly spiritual and political authority -- which the church recognized by forbidding everyone to read his books. Thus the irony that Descartes’ admirers persisted in the old Catholic practice of parting out saints.

His bones were separated, scattered, buried, moved, reburied, lost, found. This is a curious story, not uninteresting in a trivial way, but it distracts from the allegedly serious other book.

Is there a  point to all this? Not much, but Shorto does offer that after 350 years, the modernist controversy has produced three general factions: extremists of both sorts, and a dominant middle group.

Shorto puts himself among the middling wafflers. This has a curious effect: By rejecting the faction that rejects spooks and mysticism, he turns himself into a fellow-traveler of the most dangerous of the spooky, mystical murderers among us.

He does this by dragging in Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who he happens to have interviewed once for a newspaper. He writes that “she has declared that ‘we are at war with Islam,’ and that, in the name of reason, not just Islamic terrorism but Islam itself, along with its 1.5 billion adherents, must be ‘defeated’ so that it can mutate into something peaceful. This is patently frightening talk.”

Well, yes, but it’s accurate. Even so-called moderate Islam does claim (though the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the non-violent official voice of the Muslim majority states) the right to legislate for the entire world, and the conference has made it clear that this legislation will extinguish western values, such as free speech and freedom of conscience.

The way they present it, you have to take sides.

Hirsi Ali is incorrect, though, that we (the west) are at war with Islam. Most of us aren’t. 

This pitifully shallow book ends with an epilogue of striking banality: We are all flawed humans.

Who knew?