Do you "really" believe, or really believe? (with some thoughts on Rob Bell)

In this little clip Zizek brings up the problem that arises when a group explicitly distances itself from its own embedded political, religious or cultural dogmas. Let us take the example of the Norse creation myth in order to clarify the problem. In this story we learn that a great void once separated an icy land of fog and a tumultuous land of fire. But frozen water from the land of fog and molten lava from the land of fire gradually began to fill the void, eventually mixing to create the first beings (a giant and a cow).

One of the problems for us approaching a story like this lies in our need to bracket its truth. We need to make it clear that we don't actually believe that it is literally true, that it is a story attempting to do justice to our experience of reality, etc. This however leads to three interrelated problems,

1. It retroactively imposes naive belief on the originators of the story

2. It distances us from the power of the story

3. It causes those who are fully engaged in the story to react (often with the proclamation of literalism)

Let us take each of these in turn. Firstly our modern reflexive self-awareness hides the fact that such an "enlightened" mode of suspicion was not so much missing from the past, but unnecessary for it. It is only with the development of a technological discourse that we needed to introduce brackets into our cultural, political and religious claims. One of the side effects of this development was a fundamental change in how we understood the beliefs of the ancients. Because the techological discourse is ubiquitous to us we end up viewing our ancestors as operating with a type of proto-technological language that would have actually been totally foreign to them (this kind of reading is rife in the work of people like Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris as well as Christian apologists).

Secondly, our contemporary need to distance ourselves from what we believe (so as to avoid the reduction of our beliefs to the level of some technological discourse) can lead to a distancing from the power and truth of the story. We end up trying to untangle a knot that is a necessary part of such beliefs, a knot that cannot be undone without the loss of the truth itself. When the knot is untied one is left with nothing but a metaphor or an archaic proto-scientific proposition rather than with the transformative truth of the story.

Finally, when one takes a story that is deeply true to people and place brackets around it the effect can be so unpleasant to the supposedly naive believers that they end up going in the opposite direction and claiming a direct literalism (actually becoming naive believers). Here their very attempt to protect the power of the belief in question results in them losing it.

In this reading we can see that the predominant form of fundamentalism today arises as a direct result of this contemporary act of bracketing. For with the introduction of brackets and caveats to theology the unintended result is the rise of a group who attempt to protect the belief through the assertion of literalism. No matter who wins the main casualty is, of course, the power and truth of the belief in question.

There is not space here to discuss the way out of this impasse, however we might want to see Rob Bell as someone who is courageously offering a way forward with his new book Love Wins. Rob understands the knot that exists in belief and attempts to remain true to it in both the style of his communication and the content. He is however under constant pressure at the moment to 'clarify' his position (meaning to rob it of its truth). Hopefully his talent and insight will enable him to avoid what people on both sides (liberal and conservative) seek.