March 13 Tip: Read about "The Great Agnostic"

Read a review of the new book, "The Great Agnostic"
(the March 13 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/books/review/the-great-agnostic-by-susan-jacoby.html?_r=0

from the NY Times:

Susan Jacoby, whose previous books include “Freethinkers” and “The Age of American Unreason,” begins “The Great Agnostic” by asking why some people famous in their own time become part of our national memory and others fade into oblivion. A case in point is the orator Robert Green Ingersoll: a celebrity in his heyday at the end of the 19th century, he is almost utterly unknown today, even by those who would admire him if they knew more.

The first reason for his obscurity is the same reason many actors who were well known before the age of film have been forgotten: Ingersoll’s greatest fame came from his public speeches, and while the texts of these have been published, it was his performance of them that made him so beloved. In 19th-century America, speeches were a major form of entertainment. As a result, people were real connoisseurs of the craft, and a wide range of listeners thought Ingersoll was an extraordinary orator. In an age when flowery language and effusive emotion were commonly used to keep audiences rapt, Ingersoll was comparatively calm and plain-spoken, yet he was said to be riveting, drawing both tears and peals of laughter.

The second reason he isn’t remembered has to do with what was in those speeches, many of which denounced religion. He called himself agnostic, but whenever he was asked, he replied that for him there was no difference between agnosticism and atheism. He wrote and spoke about a number of topics — Shakespeare was a favorite — but his agnosticism was what most set him apart, attracting devoted followers and fervent detractors. There have been atheists and religious doubters throughout history, but the ones who remain famous after their deaths tend to have been equally famous for something else as well; otherwise, people most notable for their bravery in the face of religious conservatism have to be celebrated by a population equally brave, and that is often too much to ask. For Jacoby, prejudice against those who question religion is the “real reason” for his eclipse, far outweighing the ephemeral nature of oratorical fame.

To these explanations, Jacoby adds her suspicion that Ingersoll might have fared better had a rise in secularism, which he helped bring about, proved to be permanent. But it is wrong, she notes, to allow his stature to diminish as a result of the resurgence of religion that occurred after his death. “Intellectual history is a relay race, not a 100-yard dash,” Jacoby writes, in a nice turn of phrase. Reporting on the irreligion of many of the country’s founding figures, Ingersoll kept the ideals of secularism alive during his own era and passed them on to us. In particular, he championed the memory of Thomas Paine, whose rejection of religion had led to his being forgotten in Ingersoll’s time, despite the considerable role Paine played in turning the American colonies toward revolution. It may be hoped that Jacoby’s book does as much for Ingersoll as Ingersoll did for Paine.

Jacoby shows how Ingersoll’s fight against religion connected to his vision of a good society. During his time, religious writers commonly supported a harsh “biblical” approach to disciplining children. Ingersoll told his audiences that he had seen people who acted as though when Jesus said, “‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for such is the kingdom of heaven,’ he had a rawhide under his mantle and made that remark simply to get the children within striking distance.” He favored quips like this, and newspapers reported them with the bracketed commentary of “[Laughter]” and “[Great Laughter].” Employing similar indictments, Ingersoll campaigned passionately for women’s rights, against racism and against the death penalty. When science ran afoul of humanitarian ideals, he fought against it too. In an appendix, Jacoby includes a short, vivid speech of Ingersoll’s against vivisection, which he likened to “the Inquisition — the hell — of science.”

Jacoby’s understanding of irreligion in American history is a bit idiosyncratic. She several times states that there are two branches of American secularism: one extending from the humanism and egalitarianism of Paine and the other from the cutthroat individualism of the social Darwinists and Ayn Rand. Jacoby does not lay out a case for this claim, and readers may protest that Rand and her kind aren’t much more than outliers among atheists. Furthermore, Jacoby writes, in today’s “new atheism,” people who identify as “skeptics” are often libertarian conservatives. She doesn’t make a case for this either, and in my experience (in person, in print and online), self-proclaimed skeptics come together when questioning paranormal and pseudoscientific claims — there’s little political consensus, and what consensus there is leans more to the liberal left.

It is also worth noting that Jacoby writes entirely from the side of the freethought community, which believers may dislike. This is her right — I prefer a biography with a distinct point of view — but she tells us almost nothing negative about Ingersoll, other than hinting that “no one, of course, is ever completely free of contemporary received opinion.”

These issues aside, Jacoby’s goal of elucidating the life and work of Robert Ingersoll is admirably accomplished. She offers a host of well-chosen quotations from his work, and she deftly displays the effect he had on others. For instance: after a young Eugene V. Debs heard Ingersoll talk, Debs accompanied him to the train station and then — just so he could continue the conversation — bought himself a ticket and rode all the way from Terre Haute to Cincinnati. Readers today may well find Ingersoll’s company equally entrancing.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of “Doubt: A History” and the forthcoming “Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.”