Every day, the troubled and the despairing and the bewildered write their humble, nervous letters to the Ann Landers agony column. And every day, they are urged to seek counselling, to things over with their ministers, to pull their socks up, to play by the rules and look on the bright side. Most mornings, the jaunty column ends its brisk summary of the conventional wisdom with a ‘Gem of the Day’, some fragment of cracker-barrel sapience or wry, Reader’s Digest-style positive thinking. Recently, the above item was selected as the daily gem. Many Americans, schooled in the national dream of promise and abundance and opportunity, are condemned to experience life as a disappointment and to wonder if the fault is in themselves or in their stars that they are perpetual underlings. If this were not so, Ann Landers would be out of ajob in the same way that so many of her readers are. But it is difficult to imagine many losers facing the day with a squarer jaw or a firmer, springier step as a consequence of imbibing this particular piece of counsel over their nutrition-free breakfast cereal. It is also doubtful whether a fortune-cookie maxim of such cretinous condescension would have been chosen even by Ann Landers unless it bore the imprimatur of Mother Teresa, one of the few untouchables in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous.
Intellectual snobbery? Only if the task of intellectuals is to urge Mr and Mrs Average to settle for little, or for less. Time and again, since I began the project of judging Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation, I have been rebuked and admonished for ridiculing the household gods of the simple folk; for sneering at a woman who, to employ an old citation, ‘gives those in the gutter a glimpse of the stars’. But is it not here that authentic intellectual snobbery exposes itself? We ourselves are far too sophisticated to believe in God and creationism and all that, say the more advanced defenders of the Teresa cult. But we do believe in religion — at least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap. It is also a form of discipline. The followers of the late American guru Leo Strauss — a man who had a profound influence on the Republican Right wing — make this cynical point explicit in their otherwise arcane texts. There should be philosophy and knowledge for the elect, religion and sentimentality for the masses. By a bizarre coincidence of political opportunism, these Straussian forces are today ranged in alliance with the Christian fundamentalist cohort, founded by Pat Robertson but represented in public by the more cosmetic Ralph Reed. As can be seen from the excerpt above, Mr Reed knows how to use a script when he is in a tight corner. Challenged on his prospectus for a ‘Christian America’ that cares for people before they are born and after they are dead but is only interested in clerical coercion for the years in between, Mr Reed immediately reaches for the Gorgon’s head of Mother Teresa and turns his questioners into stone. This would be even funnier if the Christian Coalition did not have its roots in the most vulgar strain of anti-Catholicism, but as Mother Teresa has shown in her moments with John-Roger and Michèle Duvalier, and as her Church has shown in its alliance with mullahs and ayatollahs, there exists a sort of reverse ecumenicism which unites all versions of the ‘faithful’ against any version of the dreaded ‘secular humanist Enlightenment.
Agnes Bojaxhiu knows perfectly well that she is conscripted by people like Ralph Reed, that she is a fund-raising icon for clerical nationalists in the Balkans, that she has furnished PR-type cover for all manner of cultists and shady businessmen (who are often the same thing), that her face is on vast highway billboards urging the state to take on the responsibility of safeguarding the womb. By no word or gesture has she ever repudiated any of these connections or alliances. Nor has she ever deigned to respond to questions about her friendship with despots. She merely desires to be taken at her own valuation and to be addressed universally as ‘Mother Teresa’. Her success is not, therefore, a triumph of humility and simplicity. It is another chapter in a millennial story which stretches back to the superstitious childhood of our species, and which depends on the exploitation of the simple and the humble by the cunning and the single-minded.
As Edward Gibbon observed about the modes of worship prevalent in the Roman world, they were ‘considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful’. Mother Teresa descends from each element in this grisly triptych. She has herself purposely blurred the supposed distinction between the sacred and the profane, to say nothing of the line that separates the sublime from the ridiculous. It is past time that she was subjected to the rational critique that she has evaded so arrogantly and for so long.
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