NP voice of the lonely crowd

[Otto]

The voice of the lonely crowd
"After September 11, writing fiction seemed a pointlessly indulgent
exercise.
But, Martin Amis argues, against the deadly excesses of politics and
religion, the novel is a supremely rational undertaking."
Saturday June 1, 2002, The Guardian

"September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a
veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational.
(...)
The 20th century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has
been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a
mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows no sign of expiry. Since it
is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us
start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system
with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no
basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without
dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is
straightforward - and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God
existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us
religion.
(...)
The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters;
they are also misologists - haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little
more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide.
And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of
cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations. This is the thrust of the
greatest novel ever written, Ulysses, in which Joyce identifies Roman
Catholicism, and anti-semitism, as fossilisations of dead prose and dead
thought."
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,725608,00.html

The whole article is worth a read.

Otto