On Tuesday evening, the Metafizz hosted Catholic-Marxist literary critic and public intellectual Terry Eagleton in the Robert Emmet Theatre. There was a sizeable turnout – a testimony to Eagleton’s popularity as a writer and theorist in both philosophical and literary spheres.
Eagleton primarily spoke about what the philosopher Nietzsche originally identified as Western society’s transition from a theistic society to a secularized and capitalistic one. Heavily influenced by a number of philosophers, such as Marx, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and St Thomas Aquinas, Eagleton brings their ideas into the 21st century. For example, he reviews Marx’s statement that “religion is the opium of the people” by arguing that sport is its post-modern equivalent.
Similarly, Eagleton updates Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead” with a consideration of how modern terrorism and religious fundamentalism challenge the secularized liberal world order. He posits that these enemies of the West are consequences of the stifling or ignoring of religious societies by advanced capitalism. What particularly resonated with me was his observation that advanced capitalism is often embarrassed by personal convictions, so that any kind of religious expression is perceived as dogmatic and inconvenient.
If this exclusively rational ideology prevents people from having conversations about their beliefs then they become confused and lost and sometimes isolated and angry. Thus, Eagleton concludes that we need to have a “God debate” in the West in order to address this ideological crisis.
The talk was followed by a Q&A session, something that I would argue went on for slightly too long with the society not strictly MCing the event. Eagleton was left to wind up the evening himself, which is perhaps awkward for a speaker because they don’t want to appear evasive or uninterested in the audience’s questions. What was notable at the event was how a few of the questioners used heavily theoretical language, which obscured rather than elucidated their questions, and demonstrates a problem that the intellectual left has communicating with the wider population. After all, Eagleton himself has made a career of writing books and speaking in clear and lucid prose in order to democratise literary and cultural theory.
However, it was altogether a worthwhile and opportune evening of cultural analysis, and a special opportunity for anyone whose curriculum explores Eagleton’s work. I heard Eagleton speak to the Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS) in Trinity two years ago, and he covered a lot of the same ground on Tuesday as he did then. But, in 2016, these points are more than worth considering again, particularly in light of the recent rise of right-wing, nationalist politics across the Western world that indicates a deep dissatisfaction with the way it is being ruled.
