Christopher Caudwell on religion as static imagination

I have blogged here before about Christopher Caudwell. As I also mentioned, I used the title of his essay collection Studies in a Dying Culture (1938, followed by Further Studies in a Dying Culture, 1949) as the title of my podcast/radio series and one of my blogs.  Here is an interesting quote on religion from Caudwell's correspondence:

As I see it, religion undoubtedly represents very strong emotional realities, but they only become religion by religious people’s making them static, i.e. by demanding that their formulations (angels, salvation, heaven, hell, God, etc.) represent actual existent entities with the same reality of existence as matter. It is just this static formulation which is the core of any formal religion (Buddhism, Christianity, Mohommedanism). Separate that out and what have you left? Primarily two currents. One: art, or ‘poetry’—The fluid emotional experimenting with illusory concepts drawn from reality, either felt as illusory, as in our civilised age, or felt as real, but unconsciously acknowledged as illusory by the very fluidity of treatment, as in Greek myth (not Greek religion). The other current is sociological, and is symbolical of the tremendously powerful and emotionally charged currents that hold a society together, and express, in a subtle instinctive way, the fact that though individualities, we yet have a real being in common: buds of the same tree. We are not completely divided by ‘The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.’ The power of this bond is expressed in the attitude of men to a drowning stranger, a ship in distress, in time of war, and so on. You may feel a sociological conception of religion arid and empty of content. So do I, but that is because we are children of a civilisation that necessarily sees society as linked primarily by money exchanges, I mean sees that intellectually, whatever we may sometimes feel emotionally. The first criticism of Communism is always that men would never do their best work for society, regardless of income, and this expresses perfectly how debased and empty of content our conception of social relations has become. But the Greek citizen, or the merest tribal primitive, would see nothing strange in our conception of the society as the basis of religion. To him the city or tribe is joined with religion’s bonds; and even to‑day, when religions are so palpably failing, we see, in Italy and Germany, how men are bowled over by the sociological as opposed to the theological element of religion, in however questionable a guise it comes.

But why not leave it at that, you may ask, and, seeing religion’s aesthetic and sociological credentials, say ‘Pass friend, all’s well?’. Just because religion, to be religion, formulates its sociological and aesthetic beliefs in terms of science, of external reality. So that on the one hand art is held back from developing, made to accept the outworn forms of yesterday, and, on the other hand, man, mistaking social relations for divinely ordained permanences, is held back to the social groupings of yesterday. So the Greek, cramped into the City State, was torn by internecine warfare and fell victim to the barbarians he despised. So we, with our national formations, and national churches, are involved in imperialistic wars, in which ministers preach from the pulpit the divine approval of a just war. And it is no answer to say that genuinely religious people are pacifists, for we can only take religion as it appears, and to do otherwise is to mean by the adverb ‘genuinely’—‘religious in a way we approve’, which, from a historical view­point, taking religion as it has manifested itself, turns out to be not religious at all, but people who put social reality before theological formulations—heretics, prophets, and rebels.

SOURCE: Caudwell, Christopher, Letter to Paul [Beard] and Elizabeth [Beard]. 21 November 1935 (from London), in Scenes and Actions: Unpublished Manuscripts, selected, edited, and introduced by Jean Duparc and David Margolies (London: New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), extract: pp. 220-221.

Samuel R. Delany & the uses & limits of myth

In his early science fiction of the 1960s, Samuel R. Delany incorporated myth into his quest scenarios, in a highly unconventional manner, even with his first novel written in his teenage years, The Jewels of Aptor.

But already in The Einstein Intersection, Delany posits the limits of myth in providing models for the human condition. Delany's art attained a new level of maturity in the 1970s, always pushing the limits and posing the fundamental questions.

The limits of myth can also be seen in Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979) and Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities (1983).

I am hardly doing justice to the conceptual richness of Delany's fiction. I am broaching Delany's work on this blog in conjunction with my project on the limits of myth, however retooled and reinterpreted to create a perspective different from traditionally authorized meanings. Read this post in conjunction with my preceding posts on the Eden and Cain/Abel myths and Erich Fromm.

See also my capsule description of Delany's work published in the letters column of the Washington City Paper:

Bonny Delany: on science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany

From Adam & Eve to Cain & Abel

In line with an ongoing project, I finally put together a working though obviously non-comprehensive bibliography on unusual treatments of the Eden and Cain/Abel myths, actually two bibliographies, one in English and one in Esperanto (consisting of original and translated works in the respective languages), which do not completely overlap, as there is much that is found in only one of these languages:

• From Eden to Cain: Unorthodox Interpretations & Literary Transformations: Selected Bibliography


• De Edeno al Kaino: Malkutimaj Interpretoj & Literaturaj Pritraktoj en Esperanto: Bibliografio

Suggestions for additions are welcome.

Not everything gets translated, for example, Johannes Linnankoski's play in Finnish, Ikuinen taistelu (1903, ‘The eternal struggle’). See:

Johannes Linnankoski (Pseudonym of Johannes Vihtori Peltonen, 1869-1913): Literature in English & Esperanto

Ever since reading Byron's Cain in 1979, in conjunction with Blake's The Ghost of Abel, I have been interested in the reversal of the orthodox meanings of myths canonized in sacred texts. One sees an autonomous reconfiguration of myth in British Romanticism, in Blake, Byron, and Shelley. I have recently returned to this subject in engagement with literary uses and unorthodox interpretations of the Edenic and Cain/Abel myths, for example, with Imre Madách's classic verse drama The Tragedy of Man and with Erich Fromm's psychoanalytic and humanist interpretation of the Old Testament. I am interested in how far the meanings of these mythical constructs can be stretched in literary interpretations before their deployment bumps up again insuperable limitations. I am also interested in the fundamental flaws and intellectual duplicity of liberal religion. (See my previous post on Erich Fromm.)

Erich Fromm on religion (3): In the Garden of Eden

I probably first read Erich Fromm's distinctive analysis of the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in his most important book, Escape from Freedom, which as a teenager I read several times. Over the next few years I read most of Fromm's books in English.  But as with several of my youthful interests, I moved on and only took him up again decades later.

I was always intrigued by his interpretation of the Eden myth, which makes a good deal of symbolic sense, i.e. that what Christians call the Fall really represents man's rupture with his unity with nature, with his unselfconscious animal state, whereupon he gains knowledge of his mortality and becomes embarrassed by his nakedness. I believe he is correct in this, but I cannot accept this as a complete interpretation. Several myths (my interest is primarily in the Edenic and Cain/Abel myths) have been reinterpreted, transformed, even turned upside down. But I think that, at the end of the day, there's an inherent limitation in myth, and I think the Edenic myth is a case in point.

Fromm includes variations of his analysis is various of his works. It seems to me that there is an unresolved contradiction in his perspective. His thesis on the Old Testament is that Judaism begins as an authoritarian religion and ends up as a humanistic one. I think that his approach is fundamentally flawed, but at the moment I would like to point out Fromm's admission that the Edenic myth shows evidence of its development in ancient times and the survival of repressed elements (see my previous post) and that God's judgment on Adam and Eve is a manifestation of authoritarianism. So, if the Edenic myth is interpretable both as anthropomorphically authoritarian and as symbolic of the rupture with the unity of nature, there is an unresolved discrepancy here. I think both assertions are true, but this is precisely why myth is inherently limited and liberal religion inherently ideologically suspect.

Here is my list of significant references.

Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941. In Britain: The Fear of Freedom, 1942; see pp. 27-28.

__________. Psychoanalysis and Religion [1950] (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), pp. 41-42.

__________. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (New York: Grove Press, 1957 [1951]), pp. 234-235.

__________. Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1961), Chapter 6, Marx's Concept of Socialism.

__________. You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Traditions. New York: Fawcett Premier / Ballantine, 1966. See pp. 21-23, 57-58, 96-98.

Summary: Naomi Sherer reviews... You Shall Be As Gods by Eric Fromm.

__________. “On Disobedience” [excerpt] (1984).

Erich Fromm on religion (2)

The Biblical myth begins where the Babylonian myth has ended. The supremacy of a male god is established and hardly any trace of a previous matriarchal stage is left. Marduk’s “test” has become the main theme of the Biblical story of Creation. God creates the world by his word; the woman and her creative powers are no longer necessary. Even the natural course of events, that women give birth to men, is reversed. Eve is born from Adam’s rib (like Athene from Zeus's head). The elimination of every memory of matriarchal supremacy is, though, not entirely complete. In the figure of Eve we see the woman who is superior to the male. She takes the initiative in eating the forbidden fruit; she does not consult with Adam, she simply gives him the fruit to eat and he, when discovered, is rather clumsy and inept in his excuses. It is only after the Fall that his domination is established. God says to Eve: “And thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.” Quite obviously this establishment of male domination points to a previous situation in which he did not rule. Only from this and from the complete negation of the productive role of the woman can we recognize the traces of an underlying theme of the dominant role of the mother, which is still part of the manifest text in the Babylonian myth.

This myth offers a good illustration of the mechanism of distortion and censorship that plays such a prominent role in Freud's interpretation of dreams and myths. Memories of older social and religious principles are still contained in the Biblical myth. But at the time of its composition as we know it now, these older principles were so much in contrast to the prevailing thought that they could not be made explicit. And now we recognize traces of the former system only in small details, over-reactions, inconsistencies, and the connection of the later myth with older variations of the same theme.

SOURCE: Fromm, Eric. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (New York: Grove Press, 1957 [1951]), pp. 234-235.

Erich Fromm on religion (1)

The following was written August 11, 2012:

Fromm was one of my teenage heroes, beginning with Escape From Freedom, which I read and marked up several times. I don't remember how I reacted to Fromm's writings on religion, but I approach this book again with a much sharper and more critical eye as to the weaknesses of Fromm's methodology, weaknesses shared with liberal religion:

Psychoanalysis and Religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is not a very good Wikipedia entry, but it's one entry point into Fromm's Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950). I know I read this book at least twice before, because my copy is full of marginal scribbling, beginning with "completed for the second time 7/19/73".

I read and liked much of Fromm's work in English. The only one that did nothing for me was his best-seller The Art of Loving. My criticism of him 35 years ago, when I last seriously engaged him, was that he was overly idealistic. I thought him rather uncritical and gullible in his selection of heroes; he even included Pope John XXIII somewhere, which I thought was unacceptably shallow on his part. And I think he was entirely too gullible about D.T. Suzuki's propaganda for Zen. But then I left Fromm alone until I re-engaged the Frankfurt School serious in the '90s.

This is an apt summary of the first 41 pages of the book:

Religious Experience Resources - Reviews

You may discern even from this bare abstract the conceptual beefs I will have with Fromm. Left out of account here is Fromm's advocacy of Freud as humanist and critique of Jung as reactionary authoritarian. Fromm was right about Jung.

The nature of this web site notwithstanding, this quote from Fromm nicely captures the existential dilemma of human existence which is one cornerstone of Fromm's work:

MY BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE: --Excerpt from: Erich Fromm " Psychoanalysis and Religion"

Fromm is interested, as religion and philosophy once were, in investigating the "soul", a word he uses to indicate something not captured in the purview of experimental psychology. Psychoanalysis and religion both have an interest here.

     I want to show that to set up alternatives of either irreconcilable opposition or identity of interest is fallacious; a thorough and dispassionate discussion can demonstrate that the relation between religion and psychoanalysis is too complex to be forced into either on of these simple and convenient attitudes.

. . . it is not true that we have to give up the concern for the soul if we do not accept the tenets of religion . . . . He [the pyschoanalyst] finds that the question is not whether man returns to religion and believes in God but whether he lives love and thinks truth. If he does so the symbol systems he uses are of secondary importance. If he does not they are of no importance. [p. 9]

Relegating the the symbol systems and belief to secondary status I think is quite wrong and indicative of Fromm's idealist abstractions. As we shall see later on, he was unduly influenced by the Talmud.

My memories of Fromm's other writings on religion are vague and scattered. I know at one time I read these relevant books:

The Forgotten Language; an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy tales, and myths (1951)
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960)
The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture (1963)
You Shall Be as Gods: a radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition (1966)

Dominique Lecourt on the "Sacred" as Contemporary Ideology

Before so liberally attributing such a ‘sense of the sacred’ to humanity, however, are there not good reasons first of all to ponder the meaning of this notion? Far from being eternal, the category of the ‘sacred’, such as we spontaneously contrast it with the ‘profane’, was in fact invented very recently—in the early years of the twentieth century, when Émile Durkheim published Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912), and Rudolf Otto a famous work entitled Das Heilige (1917). These books have inspired the two major currents in the historiography of religion. The first comprises the ‘immanentist’ historians, who regard religious facts as assimilable to the same type of explanation as the set of phenomena studied by the social and human sciences. The second inspires those who regard such facts as intrinsically different from other facts, because they refer to a distinct order of reality. But ultimately, the opposition between ‘immanentists’ and ‘transcendentalists’ proves secondary. The essential thing is that ‘religious facts’ exist and that they are observable, identifiable as such, throughout human history. What, however, of the conception of religion that has governed the characterization of these ‘facts’? Let us read Otto: it is clearly a Christian conception—the particular conception that prevailed in the Lutheran current of the Reformation, placing emphasis upon inner feelings, on the faith that would inevitably be born out of the experience of transcendence. By what right do we universalize this conception? Can the ‘facts’ assembled under the heading of ‘Greek religion’ really be conceived in these terms? Or Roman religion? Or Aztec rites and beliefs? Buddhism? There are excellent reasons to doubt it. What, then, is the purpose of such universalization? Otto—who at least does not conceal his hand—answers as follows: in the end, it involves a celebration of the superiority of Christianity, such as he practises it, over all other religions!

SOURCE: Lecourt, Dominique. The Mediocracy: French Philosophy since the Mid-1970s; translated by Gregory Elliott (London; New York: Verso, 2001), pp. 89-90.

Malcolm X vs. James Baldwin

In Part 3 of this three-party discussion James Baldwin offers a superior perspective to that of Malcolm X's Nation of Islam nonsense, and in the process firmly rejects all religion, all theology, all myth, while showing no mercy concerning the moral bankruptcy of American society. How sad that the imbeciles who comment on this and other YouTube videos single out Malcolm X for praise, when Baldwin's world view is so much more sophisticated.

Jacques Vallee's "Passport to Magonia": addendum

The preface and table of contents of the 1969 edition are now on my web site:

Jacques Vallee: Passport to Magonia (Contents & Preface, 1969)

Jacques Vallee's "Passport to Magonia" revisited

In a previous post (Gods, UFOs, Zen, epistemology, autonomy) I mentioned scientist and UFO investigator Jacques Vallee. Of the two books mentioned, I now think that Passport to Magonia is the principal book of relevance to that discussion. The entire book is available online:

Passport to Magonia

The preface and table of contents of the original 1969 edition are missing, but I hope to scan them and make them available. Otherwise, I call your attention to chapter 5: 'Nurslings of Immortality', particularly the final sections 'The Functioning Lie' and 'Conjectures' (pp. 148-163 in the text, pp. 80-87 in the PDF file), which summarize the epistemological questions engaged by Vallee.

Note the other works by Vallee available on the same web site:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_autor_vallee.htm

You can also download this book at Downtr:

http://www.downtr.net/find/Jacques+Vallee+Passport+To+Magonia.html

See also Vallee's own web site:

Jacques F. Vallee

Secularism, Utopia & the Discernment of Myth

Boer, Roland. "Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth," Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 7 (Fall 2005).
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/secular/boer.htm

Roland Boer has written a number of books and articles on Marxism and religion, and has a blog, too. More on all that later. For the moment, this article . . .

Boer seeks a way to characterize properly the free-lance sensibilities of contemporary "spiritual experience". Four issues to address are: secularism, post-structuralism, utopian possibilities of religion, and the discernment of myths (after Ernst Bloch). I'm guessing that he really meant to write post-secularism rather than post-structuralism.

Post-secularism is manifested by the pervasive practice of asserting that one is spiritual, not religious. In the utopian realm, Boer seeks a shared language of spiritual experiences that do not erase differences. Secularism and post-secularism are inseparable and dialectically related. Contrary to the settled conception of secularization now, the concept was much contested in the 19th century prior to the interventions of Max Weber and Karl Lowith. Considering alternatives to the latter two, Boer begins with Walter Benjamin (The Origin of German Tragic Drama). Boer's description of Benjamin's notion of secularization is unintelligible to me, but it has something to do with the fall of theological/historical time into spatialization and taxonomy, termed "natural history". Benjamin's work reveals that religion has been (tacitly?) equated with Christianity, and secularization effectively equals the negation of Christianity. Religion is often assumed to pertain to the supermundane, supernatural realm, though it has taken on a broader meaning as well. Boer is unclear here, but he mentions anthropological studies and studies of religions outside of Christianity (and Judaism). All the analytical tools brought to bear on non-western non-Christian belief systems are actually secular translations of the categories of Christian religion.

Boer sees something pernicious in this, apparently, but his next move is to shifts to a discussion of Adorno's critiques of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Key here is that . . .

The language of theology, appropriated by Heidegger and existentialism, has the distinct ideological role of producing patterns of subordination to an absolute authority, which became fascism rather than God and the Church. The theological language of existentialism - which drew its sacredness from the cult of authenticity rather than Christianity – becomes, for Adorno, an ideological schema particularly suited to fascism, for which it functioned not so much as an explicit statement, but as a “refuge,” a mystification that gave voice to an ostensible salvation from alienation that functioned as a virulent justification of oppression, the “smoldering evil” (Adorno 1965, 9) of fascism.

Boer equates this view to a critique of idolatry one can find in Adorno's writings. Proceeding further . . .

Secularization then becomes a process riven with contradictions, one whose rejection of Christianity relies on Christianity, and this, I would suggest, is one of the main reasons for the fact that secularization never quite seemed to succeed . . .

Boer's overall argument doesn't make a bit of sense to me. Mini-arguments here and there do, but the overall structure of the argument doesn't cohere. Here is one piece, though, that is exceptionally lucid, and socially accurate:

The flowering of the myriad forms of religious expression and experience for which the secularization hypothesis could not account is instead described in terms of spirituality, the properly post-secular religion. I don’t want to trace the Christian history of the term “spirituality,” but one of its features is that it relies upon the widespread knowledge of a whole range of religious practices that would not have been possible without the study of religions in the first place, without the endless cataloguing and study of religions from the most ancient, such as Sumeria and Babylon or pre-historic humans, to the most contemporary forms, such as the well-known Heaven’s Gate group that committed suicide, all shod with Nike shoes, when the comet Hale-Bopp appeared on earth’s horizon. Apparently emptied of doctrines to which one must adhere, or of institutions that carefully guard salvation, or of specific groups bound by language and ethnic identity, spirituality enables one to recover lost or repressed practices, such as Wicca or Yoruba sacrifice, but to pick and choose elements that seem to suit individual lifestyles or predilections. It allows one to designate the vitality of indigenous religions (which are no longer religion but spirituality), as a lost source of connectedness with the land, with nature, or other human beings. Unfortunately, however, spirituality’s private piety and devotion comes at the expense of any collective agenda. It also relies on both liberal pluralism and tolerance, as well as the profound reification of social and cultural life that is everywhere around us. You can practice your own particular spirituality in your small corner, as long you don’t bother me, we say. Like secularization, spirituality itself depends upon its own contradiction: both rely upon the religion they reject.

This is a dead-on description of all the upper middle class New Agers I've met in recent years.

Boer next shifts to a discussion of Utopia, taking off from the thought of Ernst Bloch. Again, there's a passage I can't make any sense out of:

What is often forgotten is that the hermeneutics of suspicion and recovery in political approaches such as feminism, post-colonial criticism and liberation theology owe a debt to Bloch. It seems to me that the effort to locate a shared language of “spiritual experience,” one that is sensitive to variations of social, political and cultural difference, relies upon a utopian project in the best sense(s) of the term.

One of Bloch's central insights was not only to discern utopian impulses, but to note that when they include yearning for a lost golden age, their regression has already set in. Utopianism should be future oriented.

The problem with seeking a shared language, as utopian hermeneutics does, is that religions embody mutually exclusive world views. And there is no unmediated experience. Attempts to transcend difference betray origins, as is the case with Rudolph Otto.

Once again, Boer's logic eludes me, but his next move is to seek a unifying principle in myth.

Even more than religion per se, the Enlightenment target of secularization was myth, a term that had acquired an unwieldy cluster of associations: untruth, confusion, fuzzy thinking, the ideology of oppression, and so on. Myth found itself driven from town to town, expelled by the enlightened burghers, only to retreat to the forests and deserts, the realm of Nature, where a few wayward individuals might have some use for it. Faced with the use of myth by the Nazis and other sundry fascists, with their notions of blood and soil and the Blond Beast, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno saw only the negative aspects of the term. For Benjamin, the ultimate form of myth was capitalism, as he traced in The Arcades Project (1999), and so he sought a way beyond myth, a waking from the dream, that made use of biblical motifs. Unfortunately, he remained trapped within the myth of the Bible itself. For Adorno (1999), myth was the antithesis of utopia. Myth was the realm of the unitary principle, the abolition of non-identity that is characteristic of a world dominated by men. For both Adorno and Benjamin, utopia meant the end of myth.

Boer prefers Bloch:

For Bloch, myth is neither pure false consciousness that needs to be unmasked, nor a positive force without qualification. Like ideologies, all myths, no matter how repressive, have an emancipatory-utopian dimension that cannot be separated from deception and illusion. Thus, in the very process of manipulation and domination, myth also has a moment of utopian residue, an element that opens up other possibilities at the very point of failure. Bloch is particularly interested in biblical myth, for the subversive elements in the myths that interest him are enabled by ideologies both repetitious and repressive.

Further down . . .

At his best, Bloch’s discernment of myth is an extraordinary approach, for it enables us to interpret the myths of any religion or spirituality as neither completely reprehensible nor utterly beneficial. That is to say, it is precisely through and because of the myths of dominance and despotism that those of cunning and non-conformism can exist. It is not merely that we cannot understand the latter without the former, but that the former enables the latter.

Two examples from the Bible are given, the first concerning Eden, the second, death.

In the end, then, the value of religions like Christianity is that they have tapped into this utopian desire for something beyond death. Their mistake for Bloch is that they want to say something definite about death. But that something is hardly definite: it is mythology, and for that we need a discerning eye that can see both the liberating and repressive features of those myths.

I find Boer's conclusion most unsatisfactory and downright irritating:

If we follow through the dialectical relationship between secularism and post-secularism - a contradictory logic in which secularism turns out to rely on the Christianity it everywhere denies, a logic that appears starkly in a post-secularism that cannot be thought without secularism - then myth turns out to be the most urgent religious or spiritual question for us. Rather than the problem-ridden term “spirituality”, I have argued that Bloch’s hermeneutics of the discernment of myth provides not only a productive method, but also an approach to the utopian desire that lies behind any effort to find a shared “religious” or “spiritual” language. Such a language needs to be both critical and appreciative, for myths work in an extremely cunning fashion. It is a process that enables on the one hand the identification of those myths, or even elements within a myth, that are oppressive, misogynist, racist, that serve a ruling elite, and on the other, those which are subversive, liberating and properly socialist or even democratic ­ in other words, utopian.

I have a number of objections here, beginning with another instance of a chronic lack of logical clarity. How does Jewish secularism rely on Christianity? Or Indian, or Japanese? Suppose one rejects post-secular ideologies: New Age spirituality, etc.? Then how is myth the most urgent spiritual question, other than to neutralize it? Why should there be a spiritual language at all, shared or not? Why should anything subversive, liberating, or socialist be seen in mythical expressions in the 21st century? There's not an atom of it that is progressive in any way. Myth can only be productively scavenged retrospectively, by those not under its grip. Myth in any form is not adequate to the comprehension of contemporary society. Considering the problem more widely, popular symbology simply can't encapsulate the truth content of the state of our society at this time. Indeed, after the waning of the various countercultures of the 1950s-70s, I see nothing left for popular mythology to do. The good intentions of the past need to be salvaged as well as criticized for their naivete. (I've addressed this with respect to the individual mysticisms of avant-garde jazz musicians.) What myth is alive today needs to be killed off and dissected. In any case, Boer should be more clear and specific about what he's after.

Rosa Luxemburg on socialism & Christianity

The two texts of primary interest are:

An anti-clerical policy of Socialism (1903)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1903/01/01.htm

Socialism and the Churches (1905)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/misc/socialism-churc...

Note this very interesting essay by a prolific scholar of Marxism and religious studies:

Roland Boer, "Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg", Cultural Logic, 2007.
http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Boer.pdf

Boer finds that there has been too attention paid to the more sensational aspects of leading socialist figures' biographies and often not enough on their actual ideas. Such is the case with the martyred heroine Rosa Luxemburg. One biographer termed her linkage of early Christianity and communism a piece of historical sophistry. Boer is interested in a careful if skeptical examination, focusing on two major concerns:

(1) the political myth of an early Christian communism;
(2) the argument for freedom of conscience with respect to religious matters in the socialist movement.

Luxemburg's interventions were hardly merely historically and theoretically motivated. She had to convince Catholic Polish workers and peasants to ally themselves with the Social Democratic movement. The Catholic Church presented a formidable obstacle to socialism, and the triangulation of the Church in its competition and partial alliances with the bourgeoisie and the lower classes was a difficult one to negotiate. This accounts for the contradictions of Luxemburg's position. Sometimes she takes a straightforward anti-clerical position, but as her main enemy is the bourgeoisie, she at times argues that the clergy should take the side of the workers, but this is really to show the workers whose side they should be on were they true to their professed vocation. Boer finds her moralizing arguments questionable. Jeremiads against greed and selfishness in the abstract do not draw attention specifically to the character of social institutions, and concede too much to the theological language of sin and the metaphysical dichotomy of good and evil.

The preponderant balance of this article is devoted to analyzing Luxemburg's imaginative reconstruction of the early church and its similarity to the social democratic movement. Boer begins with a close reading of statements about the rich and the poor attributed to Jesus in the gospels themselves in comparison to the socialist perspective, looking for as close a match as feasible. The upshot, though, is that the fusion of the two perspectives carries over into the supernatural realm of eternal salvation and damnation, thus establishing a myth.

As for the church, the scenario is that the church of the exploited becomes a church of the exploiters. In reconstructing how this came to be, Luxemburg puts all of the Marxist method at her disposal to analyze the class structure and nature of production and distribution that characterized Roman and thus early Christian society. The transition in the church is attributed to the factor of size; at some point the partial sharing of wealth breaks down with the absenting of the wealthy from the poor communities and the growth of an intermediary clergy. The ascent of Christianity to a state religion sealed the deal, and the church has adapted to the rule of private property ever since. Luxemburg's characterizations of Rome (as driven by corruption) and of the medieval church are overly simplified. Yet this is an imaginative rewriting of history for popular consumption that evokes some admiration.

Curiously, Luxemburg repudiates anti-clericalism as a foundational position for socialism, as anti-clericalism historically is a tool of the bourgeoisie (especially in France). Furthermore, the bourgeoisie is inconsistent, for it never carries out a full-blown program of secularization. It may split the Church for tactical positioning, but will favor some church factions over others, empowering both itself and the church in the end. The bourgeoisie will also seek partial alliances with the working class (against feudalism) in the same manner and with the same objective of consolidating its own power. We end up with a contradiction between anti-clericalism and anti-anti-clericalism in Luxemburg's position, for the reasons described.

The argument for Christian communism is a myth, and while Boer shows skepticism for its veracity, he seems to admire its myth-making capacity, especially in the way that Luxemburg finds the early Church's situation analogous to the perspective of the social democratic movement. Apparently opinion has flipflopped as to whether the early church membership was predominantly poor. With close textual analysis Boer reveals the slip-ups in Luxemburg's argument. Neither Luxemburg nor Engels were the first or last to latch onto this political myth for their own social visions. The problem is, that by positing the original Christian community as a model, the degeneration of that mythical original community becomes mystified theologically as a fall, and the desire to enact a restoration, i.e. to look backward, is utterly reactionary.

Luxemburg, however, partially redeems herself by recognizing the distinction between production and consumption. A communism of consumption (merely distributing what has already been produced under the status quo mode of production) such as Christian communism had to be if it existed, is hardly a viable way to organize society, then, now, or in the future.

Finally, we come to the question of freedom of conscience (of belief and religious practice). Boer finds the notion suspect, because he dislikes the idea of the sacrosanct individual, and of liberalism in general. But he's finally willing to concede there's something in it after all, concluding that "only a fully collective program will enable the full realization of freedom of conscience."

All in all, Boer's analysis is quite illuminating. It is not crystal clear, however, exactly where he's coming from, his critique of political mythmaking notwithstanding. Some of the points he makes strike me as off in some way. Quoting Foucault, worries over essentialism, disdain toward liberal individualism (freedom of conscience) are eccentricities that call out for some suspicion.

It also seems that a punchline is missing. For one needs to ask: what is the state of a movement that requires mythmaking in the first place, and what are its prospects if the masses can only be won over on the basis of irrational appeals? And is the vision of Christianity in fact a savory one in the first place, or is it poison through and through, designed to appeal to self-deception, hypocrisy, and the logic of domination? And there's a more pointed question that Boer should have asked: was a Jewish intellectual like Rosa Luxemburg deluding herself that she could appeal to the better instincts of ignorant anti-Semitic Polish peasants by pandering to their religious mythology?

Roland Boer on Marxism & Religion (1)

I've recently discovered Roland Boer, who has written several books and articles on Marxism, politics, myth, and theology. He also has a blog:

Stalin's Moustache
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/

One blog entry to check out:

Marxism and Religion: A Brief Guide
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2009/02/marxism-and-religion-b...

See also:

Criticism of Religion
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2009/01/criticism-of-religion....

Boer has a 5-volume series on Marxism and religion, titled Criticism of Heaven and Earth: On Marxism and Theology. Here he mentions some figures he writes about:

Lucien Goldmann
Fredric Jameson
Rosa Luxemburg
Karl Kautsky
Julia Kristeva
Alain Badiou
Giorgio Agamben
Georg Lukacs
Raymond Williams

Other blog entries of interest:

Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/criticism-of-earth-on-...

Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of a Biblical Theme
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/i-wrote-most-of-politi...

. . . to which I've added a comment.

Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/political-grace-revolu...

Choice Biblical Morsels from Marx and Co.
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/11/choice-biblical-morsel...

A Communist Confession of Faith (while we wait for further news on NT Wrong)
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/11/communist-confession-o...

. . . with comment from me.

Of Boer's articles online, to date I've reported on:

"Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth"
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/secular/boer.htm

"Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg"
http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Boer.pdf

The next article up for review is:

"Terry Eagleton and the Vicissitudes of Christology," Cultural Logic, 2005.
http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/boer.html

. . . and there are more to be discussed.

Gods, UFOs, Zen, epistemology, autonomy

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another."

-- Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?"

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"Seeing and Believing" by Jerry A. Coyne
The New Republic, Wednesday, February 04,2009

The Edge commentaries are all over the place.

As for the original article, it effectively establishes the incompatibility between faith and science, and more generally between religion and science. From a cursory reading, I'd say it gets a little weird in sections III & IV. For example, the proposals as to what would constitute a test of religious beliefs are not convincing to me and require a deeper logical analysis. Curiously, I last thought about this about 30 years ago, when I read a most unusual book by UFOlogist Jacques Vallee.

Some of Coyne's concluding statements are most interesting:

So the most important conflict--the one ignored by Giberson and Miller--is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science--every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason--only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful--those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths--fall into the "incompatible" category.

Unfortunately, some theologians with a deistic bent seem to think that they speak for all the faithful. These were the critics who denounced Dawkins and his colleagues for not grappling with every subtle theological argument for the existence of God, for not steeping themselves in the complex history of theology. Dawkins in particular was attacked for writing The God Delusion as a "middlebrow"book. But that misses the point. He did indeed produce a middlebrow book, but precisely because he was discussing religion as it is lived and practiced by real people. The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

I have my doubts about Buddhism, which I doubt could pass the compatibility test. Coyne proceeds, in an abbreviated fashion, down the same path as Victor Stenger, who has written one of the best recent books I've seen on the incompatibility of science and theism. That is, they proceed by examining all the incompatibilities and then see what is left. For Stenger, some vague, toothless deism survives his tests; for Coyne, pantheism. I'll add that there are some lesser known variations on this theme, such as panentheism (I think you will find this and other variations in Wikipedia). But discounting these variations, we basically have pantheism and deism to deal with. Pantheism I would imagine to be more popular, but this could be my experiences of the counterculture in the '70s talking.

The question would then be, do what extent are these positions intelligible? If God is not immanent in the universe--which I think is the implication of deism (somebody correct me)--then what practical sense could be made out of the concept? As for pantheism, there are a couple ways of approaching the subject. What sense does it make to say that the universe is divine or transcendental? What specific qualities are posited other than a psychological or ideational disposition on our part? Does this mean that the universe as a whole possesses intelligence, or at least sentience, or functions as some sort of organism? If so, what is the evidence, and how does this notion concretely make sense? Perhaps the universe possesses a vital impulse or life-property without being divine per se, such as in the vitalism of Henri Bergson, George Bernard Shaw, or Hans Driesch? In my view, little would survive intensive conceptual investigation and our current knowledge of the universe except for some psychological / ideational disposition on our part regarding sacredness.

Coyne mentions the spineless position of the National Academy of Science on the compatibility of religion and science. The AAAS is just as bad if not worse. Coyne lets the cat out of the bag suggesting that scientists want to avoid losing funding and institutional support. Yet I think their cowardice goes too far. These organizations need not declare an official position against religion or theism, but it is entirely intellectually illegitimate and anti-scientific for them to declare officially a non-incompatibility between religion and science. If organized science can claim a compartmentalized mission in the totality of social life, then it should defend a compartmentalized role and refuse to take any position outside of defending the integrity of scientific research, publication, and education. Paradoxically, these organizations overreach their own sphere of competence by declaring the conceptual compatibility of religion and science rather than simply asking for a modus vivendi in social life.

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Jacques Vallée is a strange man. I think I may have seen him in person once discussing information science & technology. But I first heard of him as a UFOlogist as a child. Here's the basic poop:

Jacques Vallée - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well, about 30 years ago I read one or both of these books, most likely the latter:

Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1969.

Another edition came out a quarter century later. An excerpt can be found on amazon.com:

Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993.

The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influences on the Human Race. New York: Dutton, 1975.

Vallee had a novel hypothesis, linking UFO sightings to accounts of alien, supernatural, or divine visitations throughout human history in diverse cultures. I never took seriously any theory he had about all of this, but at the time I found his approach epistemologically fascinating, with a possible ethical implication I will attempt to clarify below.

I was reminded of this while reading the Coyne article, which cited the criteria offered by Bertrand Russell and/or others for accepting the existence of God, Christ, etc., criteria which I never found compelling. Yeah. I'd be freaked out if a burning bush started talking to me, or if the clouds opened up and Mother Mary cried out to her Jewish Son of God, "How come you never call?", but in the final analysis, what does this change? The human impulse to bow down and submit is precisely the ethical problem. But more on that later. The epistemological issue is interesting, because a phenomenon has not only to be experienced, but interpreted. One cannot simply assume that some vision or visitation is congruent with one's religious mythology or supposition about origins in outer space; rather, sensory experience is one link in a chain of investigative evidence to yield a plausible and fully generalized explanation. Vallee's book interested me at the time because his bizarro hypothesis revealed, perhaps unwittingly, what is epistemologically at stake.

---

Now back to the ethical dimension. Around the same time I was reading another book; it may have been D.T. Suzuki's contribution to Erich Fromm's Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. Suzuki was the original and foremost propagator of Zen in the western world. I didn't know his actual history back then, or how dishonest and irresponsible New Age panderers are in erasing history, in this case, how Suzuki was really positioned among the Japanese intelligentsia and Zen's link with Japanese nationalism, militarism, and fascism. Nevertheless, I'm guessing I was reading Suzuki at the time. Whoever it was, I was impressed by this characterization: Zen makes you confront who you are; it's not ultimately about what you believe and what you've committed yourself to, but who is the one who is believing, thinking, acting? In other words, there's an irreducible personal responsibility involved, which is foregrounded while religious justifications are relegated to secondary status.

Now I think Suzuki was lying, because Zen Buddhist practice is as institutionalized, ritualized, and historico-culturally specific as all get-out. As I say, New-Agers are historically ignorant or liars or both. Nevertheless, this concept impressed me at the time, and I'm pretty sure I made a connection with Vallee's book(s).

We love to submit to overwhelming power, to bow, scrape, and genuflect, in hopes we will get something out of our self-abasement. From totemism to American Idol, some things never change. "I was only following orders"--the mantra of Adolph Eichmann and Jerry Falwell. It's even worse when the issuer of those orders is entirely fictitious. But guess what, since the Nuremburg Trials that excuse doesn't fly anymore. The proper response is: fuck you, buddy, you're responsible, and you're going to hang for this.