Social class & the atheist movement (1)

As I do not regularly follow the blogosphere, I missed out on this article, which I was informed of only last week:

Counterpunched: We Have No Theory of Power by James Croft, Temple of the Future, December 20, 2012

Since I make a weak effort at best at publicizing my podcasts, I am surprised to find this:

The freethought movement has recently come in for a barrage of criticism, but not from the usual sources: in the past few months we’ve been battered from the left. It’s one thing to be attacked by right-wing fundamentalists and Fox News pundits – I expect that - but when columnists in the leftist political newsletter Counterpunch and radical Marxists like Ralph Dumain start throwing punches, I’m caught off-guard.

Perhaps this is why so many of their blows land: the movement does have a problem with sexism (as Jeff Sparrow contends), it does tend to overlook issues of economic justice (as David Hoelscher avers, twice - and I’m as guilty of this as anyone, something I’ll address in future posts), and it hasn’t grappled sufficiently with critical theory (as Ralph Dumain argues).

Apparently, one of my punches thrown in a vacuum landed somewhere, and is part of a barrage of criticism. Odd, given how peripheral I am to the entire atheist/humanist/skeptics movement. I suspect that David Hoelscher is hardly a household word, either, though I may have read his insightful essay Atheism and the Class Problem when it appeared.

Croft admits that the humanist movement is "ill-equipped to fend-off challenges from the left" and that "we have no theory of power". This is an odd way of formulating the problem. But then he addresses the basis of my ideological critique:

Dumain thinks similarly [to someone named Sparrow], arguing that “the atheist – humanist – skeptical movement, particularly in the USA…addresses only one half of the cognitive sources of irrationality of the modern world, and is ill-equipped to grapple with the secular forms of unreason, which can be denoted by the term “ideology”.” 

Similarly, the atheist/humanist movement has failed to address the structural critique that Hoelscher emphasizes.

To his credit, Croft addresses the intellectual deficiencies of celebrated humanist intellectuals like Corliss Lamont, Paul Kurtz, and Richard Norman. Lamont was involved in a number of progressive causes, reflecting the left-liberal orientation of leading humanists who publicly coalesced in the 1930s. In terms of general principles, humanism offered a strategic point of departure, but as a total world view has always been anemic. (Roy Wood Sellars, principal author of the first Humanist Manifesto, is in my opinion the most outstanding figure of classic American philosophy, but he developed his "critical realism" entirely separately from organized Humanism.)  I was a student of Kurtz 40 years ago: to me he was a mediocre representative of Cold War liberalism rendered irrelevant by the political radicalism (however deficient) of the time, including that of the student movement. His version of social liberalism is now as dead and forgotten as American liberalism itself. But Kurtz, coming from his generational perspective, having grown up in more radical times, possessed the intellectual frame of reference to concede, as not a single public advocate of "social justice" atheism would today, that "Marx was no doubt the greatest humanist thinker of the nineteenth century".

Croft is also laudably aware of the critique of irrationality in a social/historical vacuum.

The major New Atheist authors tend to criticize religion (rightly) as a sort of cognitive error or collective mistake – a “delusion” or a “spell” which must be broken – whilst mainly avoiding the ways in which religion is reinforced and propagated by societal institutions and social practices. Perhaps predictably, when they bring their intellectual backgrounds to bear on the topic, what you get are evolutionary, philosophical and, to some extent, political explorations of religion, none of which fully address its sociological aspects.

This freethought tendency, I argue, is linked to another: the tendency to focus our critical gaze on the individual, rather than the group or community. When racism, sexism, homophobia and other systematic forms of oppression are discussed, it is often in service of the reform of individuals rather than the melioration of social conditions and institutions which shape individuals in the first place.

One manifestation of this phenomenon is the omnipresence of the noxious abuse of the notion of "privilege," a concept originated decades ago by hard core Marxists who saw structural racism as key to ruling class power and who sought to intervene practically in the labor movement to the benefit of all concerned, now reduced to manipulative personalization and guilt-tripping of one group of middle class professionals by other middle class professionals who represent nobody.

Add to this the general atmosphere of superficial branding and self-promotion that permeates the age of cyber-mediated social interactivity. The ahistorical, shallow sloganeering embodied in the pseudo-concept of Atheism Plus is emblematic of our time. Richard Carrier's vicious rant, The New Atheism +, is characteristic. Following complaints that he lumped in Marxists with "Neonazis and anarchists and UFO cults and churches and right wing think tanks", Carrier removed Marxists from this grouping. Elsewhere he dismisses Marx and thus renders himself dismissible in return. Here his rant has a twofold character: one is a rejection of unacceptable behavior within atheist groupings (such as the unconscionable harassment, threats, and defamation of women), the other is drawing a line in the sand between social justice atheists and the rest of the atheist community. Several people have protested both the branding (what's wrong with "humanism"?) and the rigid us-vs.-them mentality. The shallow posturing of Atheism Plus may suit those accustomed to internecine blog/Twitter/YouTube/Facebook wars, but it succeeds only in supplementing one turn-off with another. There is certain behavior that is intolerable within any contemporary formal or even informal organization. Atheism Plus fails, though, to address intelligently the relationship between advocates of various causes and the core basis of secularist/atheist/etc. organizations.

Croft promises to follow up in future posts. I shall have to look into this. This post was well crafted.

As I am apparently a batterer from the left, it might be expected that I am a crusader for the reform of atheist organizations. But I have limited myself to a critique of the ideological parameters of the movement. It makes perfect sense for those with more encompassing political agendas to form their own institutions. In fact, since black atheists began to spring up en masse seemingly out of nowhere a few years ago, several enterprising individuals have formed their own networks, radio shows, social service programs, organizations, etc. Some have cordial or even productive relationships with mainstream organizations, others go their own way, one insists on demagogically race-baiting the whole movement in the most public way possible. But however legitimate one's dissatisfactions may be, there remains the question of what one should legitimately and realistically expect from the mainstream umbrella organizations, or from any single-issue movement, as all movements in the U.S. political context are constrained to be.

One must first acknowledge that atheism is a bourgeois movement, and will remain so no matter how one attempts to combine it with some other perspective. This is not necessarily meant as a pejorative: it's an ineluctable objective fact. One can operate outside this purview only intellectually; the most effect one can practically hope to have is to alter the intellectual culture of the movement, and even then one moves within constraints. Combining atheism with a feminist or black perspective may broaden the referential base and maybe even the practical activity of the movement, but intellectually it does not advance beyond the ideological perspective of a bourgeois movement. No number of pluses can do this. And there's nothing wrong with being an honest delimited reform movement that doesn't pretend to be something it cannot be.

Aside from issues of unethical behavior, and the more obvious issues of inclusion and tokenism, one can expect only so much from a national organization unless its mission statement encompasses or implies something it is failing to do. The central issues would be the allocation of resources and the governance of specific organizations. As an outsider I am liable to misfire intervening in public controversies, let alone in commenting on the governance and use of resources. Any complaints I have heard are technically hearsay and I cannot competently comment on them. (Because of the people I know, all such complaints I have heard have come from black atheists, but they do not in every case involve specifically black issues.) Presumably the mainstream organizations, even without noticeably altering their missions, could improve the intelligent direction of their efforts.

There remain constraints here as there are in any single-issue movement. The dictionary definitions of "atheism", "humanism" etc. notwithstanding, there is a spread of political opinion in every grouping. Imagine what would happen to the financial base of any of these organizations if the libertarians--who are the greatest enemies of progressive politics--were ejected. And, as obnoxious and lopsided as celebrity atheism is, well-connected celebrities are poles of attraction and presumably generate revenue as well as spread the message of atheist/etc. organizations to large numbers of people.

Any group maneuvering within the strict limitations of the American public sphere can only do so much, given the severity of the constraints. And it may be too much to demand the movement broaden its scope of instrumental action to encompass what only a different political movement can really address. (Prior to the McCarthy era, working class freethinkers had their own institutions, apart from any national umbrella institution--a historical fact forgotten along with the working class itself.)

For these reasons I have confined myself to an ideological critique. Involving oneself in the strategic social/political space of "atheist", "humanist", or "skeptic" is one thing, but making a total intellectual or political identity out of any of these, even combined with some other sectoral identity (feminist atheist, black skeptic, etc.) ends up at best formulating a more refined form of ideological self-deception.

Existentialism in America: black, white, left, right

On Richard Wright and Kierkegaard, an anecdote which C.L.R. James used to relate:

"Kierkegaard is one of the great writers of today. He is one of the men who, during the last twenty or thirty years, modern civilization has recognized as a man whose writings express the modern temperament and the modern personality. And Dick assured me that he was reading Kierkegaard because everything he read in Kierkegaard he had known before. What he was telling me was that he was a black man in the United States and that gave him an insight into what today is the universal opinion and attitude of the modern personality. I believe that is a matter that is not only black studies, but is white studies too. I believe that that is some form of study which is open to any university: Federal City College, Harvard, etc. It is not an ethnic matter. I knew Wright well enough to know that he meant it. I didn’t ask him much because I thought he meant me to understand something. And I understood it. I didn’t have to ask him about that. What there was in Dick’s life, what there was in the experience of a black man in the United States in the 1930s that made him understand everything that Kierkegaard had written before he had read it and the things that made Kierkegaard the famous writer that he is today? That is something that I believe has to be studied."

—— C.L.R. James, "Black Studies and the Contemporary Student" (1969)

Richard Wright and C.L.R. James were great thinkers of the modern condition in the mid-20th century. Their understandings became highlighted in the 1990s, notably by the Black British scholar Paul Gilroy (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 1993). Constance Webb, James's second wife and a remarkable personality in her own right, also recognized this about Wright in the 1940s.

Another major theme of James was the difference between "the old world and the new", i.e. Europe and the Americas. He did not cast this exclusively in racial terms, but as you can see, it is one factor he addressed. (A difference can also be argued regarding the appropriation of surrealism in the Caribbean and Latin America.)

But even within the United States, the appropriation of European thought has been widely differentiated, especially between left and right. This work is especially illuminating in this regard:

Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Contents: The "drizzly November" of the American soul -- Kierkegaard comes to America -- A Kierkegaardian age of anxiety -- The vogue of French existentialism -- New York intellectuals and French existentialists -- The canon of existentialism -- Cold rage : Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison -- Norman Mailer’s existential errand -- Robert Frank’s existential vision -- Camus’s rebels -- Existential feminists : Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan -- Conclusion: Existentialism today and tomorrow.

Here is a review I cited back in 2006:

Adamowski, T.H. "Out on Highway 61: Existentialism in America," University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 4, Fall 2005, pp. 913-933.

In Cotkin's book we can learn of the reactionary role played by the appropriation of Kierkegaard in the 1940s.  Here is one taste from Adamowski's review:

Cotkin never forgets the religious sources of existentialism, and thus Lowrie exists in his book as more than translator and editor. He had grown weary of the vapid ‘social gospel’ of 1920s and 1930s America, with its assumption that one might be virtuous and close to God merely because one held progressive social views. What does God care whether one is a progressive? Kierkegaard’s supreme indifference towards social moralizing offered escape from the anodyne social gospel, and Lowrie took up his own scholarly place in a tradition that would come to include, in Europe, Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans (1968), as well as, in America, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1945) and The Irony of American History (1952).

This is quite different from the leftist engagement with Camus and Sartre in the 1950s and '60s.  Existentialism was popular among black as well as white intellectuals in this period.  But then consider black existentialism in the 1940s, in particular Wright's engagement with Kierkegaard. I actually got some "oral history" (actually in correspondence) from Constance Webb on Wright's engagement with existentialism, which I will have to publish one day. I don't think anyone has made a study of Wright's appropriation of Kierkegaard compared to the generally reactionary role Kierkegaard's thought played in the USA in the 1940s. Wright comes to quite different conclusions in his 1953 novel The Outsider.

For more on Richard Wright, see my web sites:

Richard Wright Study Guide

The Richard Wright Connection (The C.L.R. James Institute)

Interestingly, the Richard Wright quotes collected in Wikipedia draw substantially on my work as a source:

Richard Wright - Wikiquote

Red state of mind?

Written 5 January 2007:

“Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination.”

—Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

In re:
Press, Eyal. “In God’s Country,” The Nation, November 20, 2006.

The author reviews a spate of recent books on the political dominance of the religious Right and the atheist and secularist counterattack, including Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, seeking to dispel popular misconceptions. Evangelical Christianity is to be found among the lower classes everywhere, not just in the ‘red states’. Furthermore, the moral issues that concern these voters most are class issues (and even environmental issues), not predominantly the wedge issues that preoccupy its well-organized right wing. Also, there is a history of religious militancy in the service of radical causes from Abolitionism to the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s. Religion had never declined as some people thought in the 1960s, and so the current state of affairs is not a break with the past. Nor is there any inherent reason that fundamentalism need ally with right wing politics. Black Americans are as religiously conservative as their white counterparts, yet even with some conservative attitudes, their support for the Democratic Party is solid. Even white supporters of the Republican Party oppose many of its actions.

The conservative views of this religious constituency are not to be discounted, but one should take pause before dismissing this mass of religious believers outright, as does Sam Harris in his latest book. If believers are ‘deranged’, does this mean the civil rights activists of the ‘50s and ‘60s were deranged as well? How about religionists now engaged in social service? As you might expect, the reviewer trots out the misdeeds of secular tyrants to demonstrate the folly of one-sidedness. The conclusion:

It does mean the secular left should think twice before seeing religious people as their foes, not least since such an attitude risks alienating many potential allies and confining ourselves to a small sect of like-minded believers. This, after all, is what fundamentalism is about.

While all these adduced facts are helpful, and perhaps also the admonition against lumping the entire religious public together in an oversimplified manner, the conclusion is unsatisfactory and not a little annoying. The problem with liberals and the left is not their arrogance toward religion, which, after all, few of them will state openly. The problem is taking a strictly instrumentally political view towards the pros and cons of religion: good when it’s on our side, bad when it’s on the other side. While one cannot choose one’s allies according to one’s liking, there are some deeper issues at stake in understanding the role of religion in a modern, scientific age. The role of religion is a marker of the quality of life, and however the religious positively relate to progressive politics, religious superstition is a marker of ignorance, alienation, and authoritarianism.

The problem of holding people from lower social classes at arm’s length is Janus-faced. By treating the “masses” as an anonymous collectivity, one condemns the non-conformists and dissidents among them to continued invisibility. So it never occurs to the guilt-ridden liberal or radical to think of the individuals suffering under the conformity and cruelty of the communities in which they are trapped. This is as bad as thinking oneself too good for the unwashed masses. Either way, it’s all about the capitulation to naked power.

The author fails to delve deeply enough into the dilemma we now face. He and others are on the right track in analyzing how the ‘red/blue’-state divide came to be. However, the destruction of liberalism, the isolation of its upper middle class adherents, and the descent of the nation into unbridled irrationalism, comprise an historical phenomenon that requires a deeper focus.

The USA in particular has always manifested an acute contradiction between its coexisting ultramodern and primitivist aspects, which stem from the conditions of the colonization of the American continent. We know what contradictions led up to the nation’s paramount crisis, the Civil War, which is still being fought. But, to adjust the focus for a moment, consider the contradictions that obtained at the moment Franklin Roosevelt took office: imagine the contrast between the skyscrapers of New York and the regions of the rural South that had never known electricity. Setting aside consideration of the unstable coalition that formed the backbone of the New Deal, consider the New Deal as an alliance of the New Class with the laboring masses. While the latter may have been dodgy in their commitment to a rational view of the world, and in some instances even to a secular society, it was a social order that made sense to them and worked to their advantage. In spite of the setbacks of McCarthyism, the liberal intellectual elite was in a position to maintain the fiction of the “American creed” and the consensus view of American politics. While some recognized the fragility of this alleged consensus, the illusion of stability of the Cold War liberal order maintained some credibility until it came apart in the late ‘60s.

One must understand how the Right exploited the weakening of the same liberal state the left opposed. The New Left rebelled against alienation, bureaucratic elitism, and the impersonal secular order and did not limit itself to traditional bread-and-butter issues or even equality under the law for disadvantaged groups. The political crisis of the late ‘60s, combined with the economic crisis commencing in the ‘70s and the cynicism that took over with Watergate and then stagflation, accompanied by a seismic shift in cultural norms which was the one victory the countercultures were able to sustain, weakened the entire fabric of social legitimation.

The Right absorbed the lessons of recent events and seized upon this key moment of weakness. They too re-discovered their “roots”; they too, learned that “the personal is political.” Cultural liberalism and aspiring minorities maintained a stronghold in the Democratic Party, while the Democratic Party let its white working class base twist in the wind, this after having alienated the white South in the ‘60s. This is an abridged version of my rap—”It’s the ‘70s, stupid!”—but it basically sets the stage for everything that has happened since.

Others have analyzed these developments in one way or another, but I want to inject an additional element: the reversion to irrationalism. Aside from the long-standing irrationalism of the fundamentalists, there are two other social components to consider. The ideological components of the radical political movements and countercultures (which overlapped but did not completely coincide) were all over the place. There were occult and New Age beliefs and practices permeating the ‘counterculture’ (a term which should be pluralized, since all were not white people wearing peace signs and headbands), though these influences were not all-encompassing or all-pervasive. The political movements require additional considerations. Neither they nor their participants were monolithic, but there were irrationalist tendencies in black power, feminist, and New Left circles. These were the ancestors of the postmodernism that surfaced publicly in the ‘80s once the yuppification of the new social movements in the academy was complete.

However, before assessing blame, there is one crucial component to consider: the decline of mainstream liberalism in the ‘70s. This was the major component in the decline of rationalism within the liberal intelligentsia. Its positivism, technocratic optimism, and universalist pretensions were shaken by the new pluralism and the malaise of the late ‘70s. The mainstream of the humanistic and soft social science wing of the intelligentsia began to succumb to irrationalism, as the yuppified elements of the new social movements melded into the mainstream. Before that, the irrationalist tendencies of the countercultures and political movements, however deleterious some of their immediate manifestations and potential long-range effects were, seemed rather self-contained and thus a relatively minor menace. But with the collapse of liberalism, bourgeois rationalism within the ranks of the liberals collapsed, and from this the right, not the left, profited. The impersonal liberal state was seized upon by the New Right, as they too discovered the power of the cultural movement and the implications of the notion that “the personal is political.” Their hatred of the impersonal, unresponsive liberal state morphed into an opportunity to seize political power. The logical end of the breakdown of the rational bourgeois order is precisely the theocratic fascism that threatens us now.

New class liberals, isolated from the working class base of the New Deal/Great Society coalition, could do nothing but exploit the new cultural order. The “liberal media” became “liberal” only in the cultural sense, as the marketplace must maintain friendliness to the range of its consumer base, even while politically the media became more conservative. Hence the culture industry, while giving some sops to the hateful redneck Right, in the form of talk shows of the likes of Morton Downey Jr. and Rush Limbaugh, gradually institutionalized the culture of cynicism and decadence, which on mainstream television only ran full riot in the ‘90s.

This brings us to the author’s final recommendation. If the liberal-left is going to show more respect for the working class, what is it to do? It is entrapped in a closed-feedback media loop that cannot be broken. Simply consider the nature of hip media satire. The fact is that Al Franken, Jon Stewart, Colbert and the rest constitute a segment of the culture industry produced by and for the hip, cynical upper middle class, and in the final analysis, they are all useless for a radical social critique. These are the same sort of people who gobble up the cynical and sadistic albeit sometimes hilarious degeneracy of South Park and Family Guy.

If bread-and-butter New Dealism is not on the table, or is insufficient as a basis of appeal, what could a cultural politics that would respect the working class possibly look like and could it gain either financial backers, media greenlights, or a consumer base? Must the backwardness and ignorance of working class populations be piously pandered to? On the other hand, is there an alternative to Blue Collar TV? The Nation, after all, is an organ of the upper middle class liberal-left. If these people are feeling guilty about their class privilege and political impotence, should they then genuflect to Dumbfuckistan? Granted that the “liberal”cultural industry cannot bridge the red state/blue state divide—and I’ll add that no matter how assiduously they hype the flavor of the month, Barack Obama spouting his platitudinous bullshit can’t do it either—is there an escape from this vicious circle? I don’t see a way out, but I’ll be damned if pandering to ignorance is the answer.