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'Transcendent' here in the logical sense, of 'transcendent' as opposed to 'immanent' critique, i.e., critique not based upon contradictory implications within the argument critiqued, but on considerations completely external to it, which supposedly 'transcend' it. The criticism L.W.M. brings is based on what is currently referred to as 'sociobiology,' but this neologism itself attempts to legitimise the conflation of two completely distinct disciplines, so it is a tendentious and illegitimate term. It's common, though, to see atheist pundits being lionised by the mass media - primarily the right-wing ones - for attacking religion on 'sociobiologistic' grounds. This is great stuff for all the mass media, right-wing and left, because the arguments presented by both sides are completely transcendent to one another and therefore cannot be critiqued meaningfully by one another at all - they have no logical points of comparison.
Glenn Greenwald, as someone primarily interested in the law as such, will I hope agree that such disputes are deliberately staged by the mass media and their owners in order to distract the public, while law as such, as the framework of reference for its own activity, is starved of meaningful, 'immanent' critique and impoverished, possibly with a view to eventually drowning it, too, in the bathtub.
