Praxis philosophers & the disintegration of Yugoslavia

I have blogged about the Yugoslav Marxist Humanist Praxis philosophers and documented their work on my web site:

Yugoslav Praxis Philosophy Study Guide

Among Marxist humanists, critical theorists, and other anti-Stalinists, the Praxis School was in the forefront and a pole of attraction world-wide. It is also known that, sadly, their politics disintegrated along with Yugoslavia and that their leading proponents, most shockingly Mihailo Marković, were swallowed up by nationalism. Apparently there was a dimension of the inner tensions in Yugoslavia reflected in the persons of the praxis theoreticians that was not grasped by foreign enthusiasts. This article documents the dynamics of the depressing devolution:

Secor, Laura. “Testaments Betrayed,” Jacobin. “How Yugoslavia’s vibrant Marxist humanists morphed into right-wing nationalists.” Adapted from:

“Testaments Betrayed: Yugoslavian Intellectuals and the Road to War,” Lingua Franca, 1999.

Here we have a bone-chilling historical lesson in the failure of reason to be actualized in society even by its foremost representatives. This is a sobering lesson in how precarious are the prospects, if not altogether impossible under prevailing conditions, for achieving a rational society. Uneven distribution of resources, power, and loyalties foster eventual destabilization. In Yugoslavia, the uneasy balance between centralized power (dictatorial or not) and regional/national/ethnic autonomy was totally fractured, with lethal consequences. In the USA, scarcity is entirely artificial, and so barbarism must be perpetuated by even more irrational means, fueled by uneven social development, irreconcilable differences among the population, and the exploitation of competing demographics and ideologies.

The Praxis School developed general, abstract conceptions with global appeal, and also had specific objectives in reforming the Yugoslav social system. But the world view and social theory that they developed could not sustain their political practice once the social basis for it was obliterated. They have left us with advanced general ideas of continuing relevance, but if they, faced with social disintegration, could not sustain a corresponding political practice, then what hope is there for us, in a politically regressive and rapidly degenerating social order, where ideas are not valued by anybody, to actualize our most advanced rational thought and create a reasonable society?

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.

Ludwig Feuerbach 13: Nina Power on Feuerbach on religion

Here is a 4-minute video by philosopher and social theorist Nina Power:

Radical thinkers: Ludwig Feuerbach on religion - video

This is on the occasion of Verso Books' re-publication of the anthology The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings by Ludwig Feuerbach, translated by Zawar Hanfi.

This is a collection of Feuerbach's shorter philosophical writings. We are fortunate that it is now back in print. For the contents and other writings by and about Feuerbach in English see my bibliography of Ludwig Feuerbach.

Feuerbach is most known for his views on religion, in particular his epoch-making book The Essence of Christianity (1841). Power references this work in her video. While I can't recall the items I've read, I know I have read some very intelligent pieces by her. I have no real complaints about this brief introduction to Feuerbach, but I would contrast Feuerbach with the so-called "new atheists" in a different way. It is not a question of belligerence vs sympathy for believers, but one of methodology, depth, and insight. There is more to be mined in Feuerbach than has been mobilized to date. Feuerbach is incomparably richer in insight than Dawkins' drivel about memes, religion as virus, and similar ideologically driven pseudo-explanations, and that goes for the others on the bandwagon of the journalistically dubbed new atheism. For me the watchword is a later Feuerbach work:

Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1851), translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. (See Lectures I & XXX offsite, Lecture 1 (Part II), Lecture 2 and more on my site.)

Unresolved duality in Richard Hofstadter's historical method

Written April 2, 2011 at 7:52 pm 

Here's a telling clue:

Since Julius W. Pratt published his Expansionists of 1898 in 1936, it has been obvious that any interpretation of America's entry upon the paths of imperialism in the nineties in terms of rational economic motives would not fit the facts, and that a historian who approached the event with preconceptions no more supple than those, say, of Lenin's Imperialism would be helpless. This is not to say that markets and investments have no bearing; they do, but there are features of the situation that they do not explain at all. Insofar as the economic factor was important, it can be better studied by looking at the relation between the depression, the public mood, and the political system.

SOURCE: Hofstadter, Richard. “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny,” in: The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays; foreword by Sean Wilentz (New York: Vintage Books, 2008; 1st ed.: New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 183.

Lenin understood imperialism much better than Hofstadter, who, in the second paragraph, on the causes of the Spanish-American War, states: "The most striking thing about that war was that it originated not in imperialist ambition but in popular humanitarianism." (p. 145)  This follows upon an even more naive first paragraph, to the effect of: how could Americans do such a thing as engage in foreign conquest? This is quite revealing of an inherent flaw in American liberal and progressive historiography. As Hofstadter rebelled against the economism of Charles Beard and co. that prevailed in his youth, he was left with a curious dualism (or should I say, pluralism?) of material and ideal causes. Obviously, he learned nothing from the Marxism of the 1930s, but thanks to the economism of the dominant Soviet Marxism, it too suffered from a comparable flaw of suppressing theoretical comprehension of the ideological and even irrational subjective dimension of experience which itself is rooted in the objectivity of social relations. So, akin to the banality in John Dewey's view of society, Hofstadter leaves us with a multiplicity of factors rather than an integrated conception of structure. It's a shame, because the empirical depth in which Hofstadter engages in American political history is quite instructive concerning the configuration of America's entire pathological history.

Why Stephen Bond left the "skeptics"

WHY I AM NO LONGER A SKEPTIC by Stephen Bond, Stephensplatz blog, 28 Aug 2011

While I share the impetus toward derision of the skeptics movement, for most of the same reasons, this hyperbolic argument is deficient in certain respects.The author is more philosophically perspicacious than 98% of the people who could be counted as having some relation to the atheist/humanist/skeptics movement, but the downward pull of bourgeois thought, even left bourgeois thought, is difficult to resist. This fellow is on the right track, but his reasoning and philosophical-methodological perspective need tightening up.

(1) The overblown accusations of sexism & racism, both in the way specific examples are addressed and the phenomenon is generalized to the entire movement, detract from the argument.

 (2) Neoliberalism: the author is missing something here: the way neoliberalism impacts skepticism is not that they are all neoliberals, but that neoliberalism has also pulled the left to the right.

(3) Feminism, etc.: the author doesn't see that bourgeois feminism and diversity management are also deficient & affected by the neoliberal order.

(4) The treatment of metaphor in science & its improper (and proper?) uses is badly handled. What other sources of knowledge other than science could be more useful are not specified. Had the author moved to the question of social theory & ideology critique, he would have done better.

(5) Politics: while the author is correct about pseudoscience (such as racist pseudoscience) flourishing in liberal democracies, he is rather vague about the relation between science & politics, other than the assertion than science is necessarily political.

(6) The author does not adequately address the relationship between liberal abstract ideals & their realization or non-realization in actual societies.

(7) Skeptics issues: note comments on alternative medicine, sociobiology, linguistics, economics. Aside from linguistics, I'm inclined to agree with the author. He could have said more about economics, since Michael Shermer is one of the leading purveyors of pseudoscience in this area.

(8) Harmlessness of paranormal superstition: this was my position in the '70s, but no longer. As for ridiculing the disenfranchised, their superstitious mindset is ripe for the pickings by fascism.

(9) Skepticism as dogmatism? Of course.

(10) Positivism: this treatment needs treatment. Positivism (in a loose sense) really is a problem. The fawning over every statement by Dawkins, the scientism of Harris, or the authoritative pronouncements of Hawking on the death of philosophy, are all indicators of how deeply uncritical & positivist in tendency is the whole atheist movement. Science, scientific method, etc. repeatedly endlessly, along with the obliteration of social theory & philosophy: this is how they do.

(11) Author's disillusionment: he had illusions in the first place. His were not mine.

Futurology as bourgeois ideology: from the Cold War to now (2)

In my previous post, I mentioned this book:

The Future of Society: A Critique of Modern Bourgeois Philosophical and Socio-political Conceptions, edited by Murad Saifulin. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973.

Completing my quick scan of the book, I concluded that it was even more bankrupt than I had imagined. The book is saturated with such grandiose propaganda, the ideological content of western futurism pales in comparison to such bombast. It is also remarkable how poor a critique of bourgeois futurology this is.

Bourgeois futurology conceals any systematic understanding of society, renders the underlying properties of capitalism invisible so that it is not even raised as a question, and projects technocratic solutions as triumphing over whatever laundry list of questions it addresses. The occlusion of social critique by the techniques of forecasting is perhaps comparable to the pseudo-scientific basis of bourgeois economics.

Yet the Soviet approach delineated in this book is concerned primarily with defending its side of the Cold War, demonstrating the superiority of its system and the inevitable victory of communism. Otherwise the Soviet vision is equally as technocratic. As the Soviet system is competing with the capitalist system almost on its own terms while disguising its own nature, its critique of bourgeois futurology must itself be truncated.

The missing prediction of the demise of the Soviet Union itself is itself a commentary on the validity of this perspective.

How different the presuppositions of an unlimited future seemed back in 1973 (though it must be noted that the energy crisis threw serious doubt into the viability of such a prospect). Here is one futuristic vision from the Soviet Union of 1973 that parallels even the current fantasies of the West. This is a section on the future colonization of outer space:

Future problems of the exploration of the Earth and outer space

Best laid plans of mice and men . . . then, and now?

Futurology as bourgeois ideology: from the Cold War to now

Imaginings about the future, whether driven by technological projection, science fiction, or questions of political and social organization, don't have a specific starting point in time. Obviously, with the massive political and scientific-technological change in the 19th century, avant-garde projections about the future became the order of the day, coinciding with the birth of real science fiction. But the century of futuristic imagination is the 20th century.

I can only speak about it personally from the standpoint of the United States. Outside of the genre of utopian/dystopian fiction, the prototypes of which mostly originated in Europe, most imaginative projections of the future I encountered growing up were technological in nature. The prospect of space exploration was part of this scenario. Naturally science fiction ran ahead of reality, but science fiction authors were also advocates of space exploration, and the prospect of eventual colonization of other planets was one futuristic scenario.

Of course the 1950s and '60s were an era in which, the dangers notwithstanding, there seemed to be unlimited vistas for the future. The Club of Rome's report on the limits of growth and the first Earth Day in 1970 rained on this parade somewhat, but could not wash it out.  We live in a very different time now: we know we're doomed, but deny it.

In the '70s I became wary of futurology as a quasi-scientific endeavor. I endured a few three-hour lectures by Buckminster Fuller, then all the rage, and I got disgusted with him. I checked out some of the literature. I remember The Futurist magazine. It became clearer to me that this intellectual discipline was highly selective in its methodology, interests, and purposes, and that it was fundamentally ideological in nature. Here is one "in" to the field:

Futures studies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One place to get a contrary perspective, with a mixture of critique and mystification, was the Soviet Union, the USA's arch-enemy. I vaguely recall seeing a title or two critical of the futurology racket. The web site leninist.biz aims to list and digitize Soviet publications in English translation. Two or three titles here are relevant.

Probably the most important, as it is cited elsewhere, is not available online, but here is the reference:

Shakhnazarov, G. K. [Georgi Khosroevich] Futurology Fiasco: A Critical Study of Non-Marxist Concepts of How Society Develops. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982.

This book is available online:

The Future of Society: A Critique of Modern Bourgeois Philosophical and Socio-political Conceptions, edited by Murad Saifulin. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973.

This book traces ideas about the future from far back in the past. As for critique of bourgeois futurology, the entire argument is predicated on the premises of the Cold War, obsessed with the role of anti-communism in bourgeois thought. Whatever criticism of western conceptions might be fruitful is drowned in ideological propaganda for the Soviet system. Even by reasonable standards of the time this aspect of the argument is a botched batch of verbiage. But now that the Soviet Union has been extinct for two decades, the argument looks even more ridiculous. This is a shame, because there was really a critique to be had, irrespective of any apologia for the USSR.

Another book is included in this web site. The first 99 pages are supposed to be available, but the link to the PDF is not working now:

Streltsova, N[inel]. Looking into the Future. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987.

Whether there is anything of a methodological nature beyond specific forecasting for the 21st century I do not know.

While I have not researched the matter, obviously one need not be dependent on anything the Soviets produced to construct a critique. And of course now neoliberalism has conquered the world, which changes the priorities of the ideological struggle over the future. While there is no effective institutional competition for the neoliberal technocratic vision for the future, the ideological delusion of the glories of a technological future is more self-deceiving than ever.

While technologies can be imagined which well could be developed over the coming half-century, the gap between reality and the frontiers of imagination has narrowed. A telling symptom is the banality and lack of imagination in the premises of the science fiction and fantasy television and film entertainment presented to us. Thanks to the advanced technology of real life and visual production, the special effects that can now be produced are more spectacular than ever, effectively distracting from the thematic poverty and uncritical nature of what is being produced and consumed. Surface sophistication effectively occludes underlying philosophical insipidity.

The elephant in the room was always the capitalist system, a critique of which was always tacitly censored, and now globalized capitalism, even without an imminent threat of thermonuclear war, which once loomed so large (and perhaps will again), is on the verge of destroying the whole world. Of course our popular culture is full of disaster scenarios, and the environmental crisis is no secret. Still, glorious fantasies about the technological future are promulgated and eagerly lapped up by devotees of science and technology, oblivious to the inconvenient truth that bourgeois reason is at the end of its rope.

One Marxist view of Dawkins & Harris

This is old stuff, but here's the info. I could quibble over some details, but there are important criticisms here of the political and social ignorance of Richard Dawkins and especially of Sam Harris. These pieces come from the World Socialist Web Site. Sectarian politics notwithstanding, there are some intelligent commentaries from a philosophical perspective.

Atheism in the service of political reaction: A comment on author Sam Harris

By Christie Schaefer, April 16, 2007

In the recent review of Richard Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion, Joe Kay mentions in passing the author Sam Harris, noting that the idealist standpoint of Harris and some of the other advocates of atheism is often bound up with reactionary political conceptions. (See “Science, religion and s

Science, religion and society: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion

By Joe Kay, March 15, 2007

In his new book, Dawkins has done us a service, if only in making more acceptable the general proposition that religion and science are at odds with each other, and that it is science that should win out.

Social paranoia: one photo says it all

I snapped this photo in early April 2011 across the street from the Southeast branch of the Washington DC library. It perfectly illustrates the ideology of right wing paranoia that forms the subject of my current research.

Theorizing Social Paranoia (2)

 Listen to my podcast on this subject:

Dumain, Ralph. “Theorizing Social Paranoia,” 22 May 2011, 58 min., an episode of "Studies in a Dying Culture" on "Think Twice Radio".

Theorizing Social Paranoia (1)

Theorizing Social Paranoia: A Précis for Discussion

By Ralph Dumain

“Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities of the irrational, mystical character structure of the people of the world.”  — Wilhelm Reich

“You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you.” This adage reveals a fundamental problem in addressing the question of social paranoia and the concomitant phenomenon of conspiracy theories. Without the consideration of truth content, or a commitment to some view of social reality by which we could divide rational from irrational truth claims, we are left with a formalistic account of social paranoia based solely on defining characteristics of what Richard Hofstadter famously dubbed the “paranoid style.” Here are some essential questions to be addressed.

Is social paranoia essentially the same in all historical periods, and in all social and political circumstances and movements, or are there qualitative differences which need to be highlighted? What is the relationship between occult and supernaturally based paranoia—in primitive societies, the civilizations of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity—and secular paranoia—about elites or cabals openly or secretly controlling social institutions, the state, the economy, the world order?  What transformations has the granddaddy of social paranoiac obsession—anti-Semitism—undergone since the Middle Ages? How shall we compare paranoia in power (in those who command state or institutional power) with the paranoia of the putatively powerless? Is there an equivalence between left and right, or are irrationalist worldviews associated with social paranoia essentially the property of the authoritarian right-wing? If there is an essential difference between right and left, what are the telltale signs of right-wing ideology? Are progressives vulnerable to appeals from the right, and are there examples of right-wing tendencies ensconced within the left?

Are the “moderate men” who evince a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude toward left and right guilty of shifting political discourse to the right?

The pooh-poohing of “conspiracy theories” is deployed by the right when it seeks to dismiss legitimate political criticisms and exposés, and often by the left as a distraction from structural social criticism. Given the shifting boundaries of what might be considered outlandish conspiracy claims in light of covert actions revealed over the past half century, how do we distinguish between at least marginally plausible conspiracy theories and totally outlandish or outright crackpot claims? What are the telltale code words and concepts associated with right-wing or other crackpot thinking? What are the tacit assumptions and characteristic fallacies in reasoning to look out for?

Finally, what does a climate of fear do in itself to break down rational processes and confuse attributions of causality? Wilhelm Reich, quoted above, himself succumbed to paranoiac thinking—even while diagnosing it—under the pressure of real persecution and the political horrors of fascism and Stalinism, and descended into crank pseudoscience even while making astute observations of the mystical mentality. Does a climate of fear—in which one has real reason to fear social forces which themselves may be imbued with social paranoia—bear the danger of impairing the rational capacity of a rational opposition?

In preparation for our forthcoming discussion, please consult the bibliography (with web links) I have prepared:

The Paranoia Papers: Theory of the (Un)Natural History of Social Paranoia: Selected Bibliography

10 April 2011

Stark naked sociology of religion

While I'm trying to remember just why I can't stand Rodney Stark, let me call your attention to this article:

Stark, Rodney. "Religious Effects: In Praise of 'Idealistic Humbug'," Review of Religious Research, 41: 3, 2000, pp. 289-310.

Stark indicts the entire sociological tradition for denying religious belief as a socially causal factor. Stark aims to prove that certain historical events attributed to material causes have their roots in religious beliefs. Stark also argues that a sociology of religion ultimately rests on a sociology of gods.

Stark's examples are indeed interesting, but he missed something in his analysis of what's wrong with Marxist as well as other sociological explanations of religion.

If you'll notice, the problem centers on attributing ostensibly religious motives to economic or political motives. Apparently, a fair amount of bad Marxism was done this way. But positing a duality of motives in this way obscures the way in which people interpret their experience through the lens of their ideology, and more fundamentally, how their very subjectivity is formed.

The question, never satisfactorily addressed within the atheist movement, and apparently not fully via sociology, is what is religion exactly and what is its relation to social causality? Only dialectical social theory can address this riddle, not economism, not a crude conception of ulterior motives, not an assumption that irrational mythical thinking is a mechanically determined epiphenomenon of rational material interests, not just a translation of subjective motivations into putative objective material motivations without taking into account the formation of subjectivity itself.

Stark has some interesting observations, and his notion of the consequences of causal efficacy attributed to gods is worth investigating, but he remains trapped within the parameters of bourgeois sociology.

Marxism & the Jewish Question

There are certain foci of social and historical investigation, which, when plumbed to their depths, unravel the entire weave of the modern world. Such are the roles of Jews in Europe and blacks in the Western hemisphere. In addition to the question of instrumental politics, there is the theoretical grasp of the collective existence of these groups, which, I argue, is the most symptomatic indicator of the progress and limitations of social theory.  Thus, to advance one of my research projects . . .

Marxism & the Jewish Question: Selected Bibliography

This links to a related project of mine:

L. L. Zamenhof & the Cultural, Religious, Professional & Political Context of 19th-20th Century Eastern European Jewish Intellectuals: Selected Bibliography

Here is another resource, from the Marxists Internet Archive:

Jews, Marxism and the Worker’s Movement

Not by Genes Alone

This looks more promising than the fare offered by Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson:

Richerson, Peter J.; Boyd, Robert. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Publisher description:

Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In this stunning exploration of human adaptation, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics.

Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd illustrate here that culture is neither superorganic nor the handmaiden of the genes. Rather, it is essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economics—and building their case with such fascinating examples as kayaks, corporations, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry them—Richerson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked, and they show us how to think about their interaction in a way that yields a richer understanding of human nature.

In abandoning the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived, Not by Genes Alone is a truly original and groundbreaking theory of the role of culture in evolution and a book to be reckoned with for generations to come.

Ernst Gellner on ideology

Gellner, Ernst. "Notes towards a Theory of Ideology," L'Homme, tome 18 n°3-4 (juil.-dec. 1978), pp. 69-82.

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Gellner insightfully targets a few key characteristics of religious ideologies, most notably Kierkegaard, but falls down on a general theory of the subject. His first mistake is to characterize ideology as a noun: "Ideologies are systems of ideas or beliefs." But ideologies are also relations between persons and sets of ideas or beliefs, and relations between persons and the (social world), which involve relations between the sets of ideas or beliefs and the world. Ideology is a concept with many meanings and theories behind it, but most powerfully, it designates a verb more than a noun. It is not just the ideas one holds, but one's relationship to one's own ideas and to social practice that reinforces the relationship. Hence even perfectly rational sets of idea or beliefs can still function ideologically in the bad sense, i.e. in a fashion which remains unconscious to the holders and appliers of those ideas or beliefs.

Gellner proceeds to dissect Kierkegaard, singling out the notion of "offensiveness", in Kierkegaard's case, the offensiveness of Christianity to reason. Gellner concludes that ideologies must simultaneously attract and repel, that this must be an inherent property. The inner tensions and experiences of offensiveness on the part of potential candidates for ideologization serves as a confirmation of the validity of the ideology itself. Religious existentialism plays on an anxiety about reason and attacks the very notion that people's view of the world can be rationally warranted, claiming a deeper insight into the human condition. Simultaneous menace and attraction/temptation constitute the driving force of the ideological process.

The very eccentricity of ideologies distinguish and isolate them from other ideas, including commonsense notions.

Kierkegaard, like Pascal before him, trades on despair. Either one is despairing or too lacking in consciousness to recognize one's despair. Hence exploitation of vulnerability is key to the process.

Ideologies claim to be intellectually sovereign, they monopolize validation, establishing not only the truth but the criteria for distinguishing truth from falsehood.

However, there is a hidden duality here. Ideologies, in attempting to lure prospects and produce converts, must tacitly admit the context of a broader world which they did not create and do not maintain under their control. Ideologies claim to be all-embracing, but must implicitly posit by contrast a richer empirical world and implicitly accept its conventions.

With this realization, Gellner attacks the premises of two modern theologians, Barth and Tillich, who represent opposite extremes. Barth's disregard for justifying Christian belief does not do justice to the hidden ambivalence of all ideologies, and any belief system could be posited as an unassailable absolute, this Barth neglects the very basis of the efficacy of ideological indoctrination. Tillich goes to the other extreme, eliminating all offense by equating 'God' with 'ultimate concern', by which logic every man has a God, but not necessarily the same one.

There is a footnote here about "fashionable Marxist theology", i.e. that Marxism cannot be transcended because it is the philosophy of our age (combined with a remark about the underdetermination of theory in philosophy of science), and attempts to refute it confirm the bourgeois mentality of the skeptic. I presume Gellner is alluding to Sartre here. This does not seem like much of an argument in embryo against Sartre, and there are far more apropos targets. As I will argue later on, Gellner is ill-equipped to analyze the ideological (in the bad sense) functioning of Marxism, particularly in its worst Marxist-Leninist incarnation.

Gellner's next concern is to distinguish between two oft-conflated issues:

(1) the social construction of reality
(2) the role of ideology within reality

The first concern has become a fad, a super-holism (my term, not Gellner's) according to which systems of ideas are borne not by individuals but by cultures or languages, which leads to relativism (my term, not his). Oddly, Gellner finds this fad nurtured by Chomskian linguistics, i.e. the notion of a universal generative capacity (p. 77, 79). This is nonsense, but what Gellner is really after is French structuralism, or the misapplication of structural linguistics to social phenomena which are nothing like languages. Bourdieu, who quotes, Chomsky, is criticized here (78).

However and to what degree the social construction of reality is effected, ideology has a narrower scope; it is something that happens within the world. This smaller question may be more manageable than the broader one.

Finally, Gellner aims to exclude pre-literate, tribal religions from the category of ideology: the formulation of doctrine is too weak for there to be competition between doctrines rather than magical practices.

While Gellner emphasizes at the end that he is offering notes, not a complete theory, I am nonetheless dissatisified. His greatest insight is into the coercive mechanisms to be found in Kierkegaard, and the complementary defects of Barth and Tillich. This provides an "in" to the mechanisms of faith-based ideological processes. The conversion experience and the "leap of faith" are crucial in this context. Others delimit the scope of "ideology" in different ways, if at all. Gellner cuts off preliterate religious and magical superstitions while focusing on religion and saying little about secular ideologies. Others limit the notion of "ideology" to the modern world, excluding all pre-modern religious societies. Other than the dig at Marxism, which comes down to an implied dig at Sartre, Gellner curiously fails to address a crucial social fact of our time, ideology not based in religion.

I'm guessing that his implied takeoff point is that of a bourgeois liberal out to expose the irrationality of 'extremism', i.e. the left and the right. If ideologies are totalizing though not total, then there must be mechanisms insulating them against criticism, for which Gellner offers a carrot-and-stick mechanism as to how they operate. One might assume that a conversion experience is necessary by which lured recruits take that leap of faith by which an ideology is internalized as a self-authorizing master interpreter of social phenomena. The surrender of rational individual autonomy that Kierkegaard sadomasochistically gloried in could presumably be duplicated in secular ideologies.

However, this is too crude a construct by which to understand the various shades of Marxism and how they operate or not to insulate their assertions from rational criticism. Hopefully, Gellner is not as stupid as Popper. Certainly, the history of the Communist Parties (and their Trotskyist antagonists) provides ample examples of where Marxism in practice went wrong and substituted self-authorizing dogma and manipulation for critical thought. To analyze this is detail requires another post.

For more on Gellner and links, see my entry on Gellner in the first incarnation of another of my blogs, Studies in a Dying Culture.

Michael Shermer, racism & social "science"

I can't believe I forgot to blog on this priceless specimen of pseudoscientific obscurantism. The following, constructed from old e-mails, is fragmentary. I don't think I ever wrote out my entire analysis of why this article by Shermer is utterly bankrupt. Perhaps you will be able to see it for yourselves.

08 Jan 2007
We're all racists, unconsciously: Kramer just blurted out what unfortunately comes naturally to all of us.
By Michael Shermer, L.A. Times, November 24, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-shermer24nov24,1,5226012.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

. . . Stumbling on this old article, I find myself amazed that Shermer has the cheek to pronounce himself a scientific expert on matters such as these. He makes some remarkable extrapolations from these little experiments and declares, based on his expert knowledge of evolutionary theory, that the biases he lists are simply natural in-group out-group programming instilled in us by evolution. And that's his explanation in toto. This, from an alleged skeptic. With friends like Shermer, Harris, and Dawkins to explain sociopolitical realities to the world in the name of science as childishly as they do, who needs enemies?

16 Jan 2007

While a couple other people [on the now-defunct Freethought Forum] expressed skepticism viz. the psychological experiments in question, nobody saw the essential problems with Shermer's

BS. The secular humanist community is simply not prepared to move beyond its shallow scientism to a wider methodological basis for explaining social phenomena. And these postmodernist shits have only made the job more difficult.

I find I can't get through a single day of intellectual work without addressing the fundamental dichotomy at the highest level.

I am operating with this duality of scientism and irrationalism at a very high level, because in fact even those few who recognize the duality have not refined their analysis sufficiently or applied it to contemporary situations. I've been addressing it in the secular humanist/atheist community, and these people are not prepared to deal with it. I've been questioning their heroes Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Shermer, Wilson, etc. and they can't deal with it. The one person I found [in this particular forum] who admits of my fundamental criticism is a dingbat who's into postmodernism and queer theory. This is the ideological landscape we're living on.

Cornel West, liberation theologian?

Written 19 January 2009

Johnson, Clarence Shole. Book review: Rosemary Cowan (2003), Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption, APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, Volume 03, Number 1, Fall 2003, pp. 52-56.

Johnson points up the contradictions in Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism and sociopolitical perspective. West eschews the label "liberation theologian" because it commits one to a transcendentalism which his allegedly experientially based pragmatism negates. But how can West's Christianity avoid transcendentalism, or the issues of theodicy raised by William R. Jones? Christian theodicy is logically at odds with an empirically based conception of sociopolitical causality.

I think this highlights the bankruptcy of West's left bourgeois theophilosophy.

Sam Harris, Islam, neurophysiology & historical illiteracy

So far on this blog I concentrated my criticism of Sam Harris on his op-ed piece "Head-in-the-Sand Liberals". While he is eloquent on the need to oppose "faith", he is a very ignorant man on most other things. Here is a sample, his most recent piece on the threat of Islam:

Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks, The Huffington Post, posted May 5, 2008

Harris complains about the cowardice in the West of publicizing attacks on Islam, the Koran, Muhammed, etc., due to the fear of violent retaliation. He insists that the religion of Islam is intrinsically related to Islamic political violence and wonders where the Muslim moderates are in speaking up against it. He insists on the right of free speech, which he counterposes to the barbarism of Muslims ready to do away with anyone who dares to exercise it in the criticism of Islam. There are, however, some gaps in Harris' argument. He has no real notion of social causality. Doctrines produce behavior, but what produces and sustains doctrines, the interpretation of doctrines, and the translation of doctrines into action? What are the institutions that reinforce dispositions, convey information, and instigate actions? And what about the context in which information is conveyed? The problem begins in the very first sentence:

Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam.

Wilders is under a death threat for a documentary film denouncing Islam. If Wilders has a right to free speech, and Islam is bad, then surely Wilders should be defended. But note at the outset Wilders is described as "conservative Dutch politician and provocateur". Wouldn't this set off some alarm bell to anyone not in a coma? One might want to know something about what Wilders' politics is all about, how it relates to the Netherlands's Muslim population, and to what extent this population refuses to conform to West European secular democratic norms, and to what extent they are under siege by European right-wing hate groups. What is Wilders' goal in defaming Islam; is it part of an illegitimate assault on the immigrant population? I don't know the answers to any of these questions, but I think they are essential to an assessment of the situation.

Or perhaps Wilders' motive and political agenda are irrelevant to the content of his film: if the content is sound, then what does the political context in which it is generated matter? And regardless of the morality of the situation, doesn't Wilders have any absolute right to free speech in any case? Would anything be different were a person of Muslim origin to circulate anti-Islamic materials, as many, including most famously, Ayaan Hirsi Alihas done?

I have no problem with the denigration of Islam as a general principle, but there is no action that doesn't have a context, and we are deprived of the real social context in which Wilders' film is circulating. We don't know, for example, what percentage of the local Muslim population supported or approved of the assassination of Theo van Gogh, or how the information about the provocative cartoons or this film is communicated to the rest of the Muslim world to stimulate retaliation.

What about Harris' characterization of the global geopolitical situation? Can the very concept of "culture war" explain the world situation? Is it true that the the struggle over Islam is the world's most important culture war? And that the "zero-sum conflict" between Islam and civil society makes sense as an explanatory framework for understanding the world system?

The fact is, Harris is an ignoramus. He lacks the elementary tools to analyze society, and he knows nothing of history. He deduces society from fragmentary facts and abstract principles, as if belief systems are suspended in air and just generate social realities . . . or, are just rooted in the physiology of the brain.

Which brings to mind his only area of expertise. On his web site he presents four surveys, one or more of which he requests his readers to fill out, as part of a research project on the neurophysiology of religion:

Research Volunteers Needed

We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain.

I suggest you take a look at one or more of these questionnaires. I filled them all out. Perhaps they are not as idiotic as they seem. I don't remember much about survey design and psychological testing, but I'm guessing that the questions are designed to elicit telltale responses while concealing their purpose from the test-taker, so that the testees reveal more about themselves than they consciously intend. Still, it's hard not to think that these questionnaires are utterly ridiculous and can't possibly measure what they purport to measure. And can you even imagine the ideological biases of the survey designer? And for all we know, people who concoct questionnaires like these themselves belong in a straight jacket and a rubber room.

But more generally, the question must be asked: what can it mean to ascertain religious faith based upon the study of brain physiology? Of course we can gain knowledge about how dysfunctional thinking operates on the basis of the physiological and psychological mechanisms at work. But separated from real behavior in social context, they are just abstractions, descriptions of abstractly delineated processes. Everyone concedes that environmental stimuli trigger these brain processes, but then don't we have to understand just what the "environment" is, and how its structure and history--i.e. the structure and history of society--create a structure and history of responses and dispositions in the brain? How can we actually know about the genesis of and mechanisms of social reinforcement of belief systems by studying brain physiology in abstracto?

It's too bad people like Harris cannot learn the lessons of the Soviet developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, for starters. The same ideological naivete gets repeated over and over. We get a regression to metaphysical abstractions of social behavior--in-/out-groups, prejudice, etc.--in combination with natural-scientifically conceived biological constants, in order to explain behavior, and real society and history drop out of the picture. Instead of institutional analysis combined with the essential concept of ideology, we get pseudo-scientific garbage like "memes" and pseudo-Darwinian explanations of economic systems and social history. But instead of going after the likes of Dawkins, Shermer, and Wilson, let me focus on the problems of self-enclosed biological explanations.

Yesterday I happened upon perhaps the worst "scholarly" book on bigotry I have ever seen:

Dozier, Rush W., Jr. Why We Hate: Understanding, Curbing, and Eliminating Hate in Ourselves and Our World. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2002. Publisher description.

Perusing the book, and reviewing the bibliography, I am astounded how completely devoid it is of something you will find in all serious books on this subject--real information about society and history. There is no usable social knowledge or information in this crappy book: it's all about brain physiology combined with platitudinizing. I cannot conceive of anything with scientific pretensions more disgraceful.

This is the same clueless ignorant level on which Harris operates. And most other prominent public atheists on the American scene are no better. They are disgraceful representatives of atheism, not because they are too haughty and confrontational in their atheism, but because they are politically bankrupt. With what they contribute to popular enlightenment with one hand, they take back with the other. These people have contributed mightily to the provincialism and miseducation of their fans regarding the nature of their society. Their science-worship itself is a source of ideological mystification.

Socialism & Humanism: Novack & Mattick

Written 11 April 2007 (now edited):

Someone recommended these texts as introductions to the relationship between Humanism and Socialism:

Paul Mattick, "Humanism and Socialism" (1965)

George Novack (William F. Warde, pseud.), "Socialism and Humanism" (1959)

As a rule American freethinkers, atheists, and secular humanists have no relevant background to evaluate these sources. Not being a proselytizer, I'm not out to convert people. Then again, I'm all for united fronts. My response below illustrates my caveats regarding the relation between abstract philosophical perspectives and social theory.

(1) I read Novack extensively many years ago, but I don't remember everything. I am less familiar with Mattick, though I do know in general what he wrote about. Are you interested in their thoughts on humanism, or in their specific theoretical analysis of socioeconomic systems? What do you seek to learn from them?

As for the connection of socialism with humanism, the issue immediately becomes more general and philosophical, which is fine, but then the specificity of history and politics and economics and sociology can get lost, if the discussion gets limited to very general principles.

Except for certain French intellectuals since the '60s (and their groupies), pretty much everyone in the socialist camp has seen socialism as inherently humanist, however we might view them.

But aside from that, there are so many different standpoints grouped under this general political rubric, I would not consider any text authoritative. I would need something more to go on about what a person wants to know before I would make recommendations for a particular reading trajectory.

(2) My reactions re Novack:

Generally, without a background re some author in question, it can be difficult to evaluate his or her statements, as there are unstated assumptions behind some of them.

Novack was an orthodox Trotskyist, a reasonably intelligent man who played an interesting historical role, most notably in organizing a counter-trial with John Dewey to oppose Stalin's frame-up of Trotsky.

With respect to this essay, I'll focus only on my quibbles.

(a) Novack states categorically that while Marxism and Humanism overlap, they are two different categories. But this is a bad move to make, for there is a misleading tacit assumption. He is equating "humanism" as a general concept with the de facto American humanist movement, as one can see viz. his remarks about Corliss Lamont. But this or that American humanist or group of them is one thing; "humanism" as a historical movement is broader, and "humanism" as an abstract concept, is not inherently synonymous with either of the two, certainly not with the former.

Novack is correct in his criticisms of prevailing tendencies among humanists in our neck of the woods, who are scientific materialists with respect to nature but fall down in their analysis of society. Many are social reformers as well, says Novack, but fail to go all the way.

But what is "all the way", exactly? I will defer this question for the moment.

(b) Socialist humanism: E.P. Thompson published his epochal The Making of the English Working Class in 1963. Novack's essay came out in 1959. At that time, Thompson's major work was a huge bio of William Morris. So yeah, Thompson had romantic tendencies, which also helped him break from the Communist Party of Britain, which like all such parties, made their intellectuals miserable.

And Irving Howe had his origins in the Trotskyist movement, though he became softer in the 1950s.

Now note that Novack is a defender of scientific socialism, and he is addressing the generation that has just discovered the "young Marx" as an alternative to Stalinism. Novack, whose original audience consisted of Trotskyist hacks, is out to warn his comrades of competing ideological tendencies, and is thus wary of the "reversion" to the young, humanistic Marx, shorn of political economy and scientific socialism.

However, Novack's admonitions show him in his role as a hack, defending one doctrine against another. While he is not exactly wrong, he is not completely on the right track either. This is because, on the philosophical plane, he has not calibrated the relationship between different levels of abstraction. Humanism is more philosophically abstract than a proper social theory--"scientific socialism" or any other--humanism is a philosophy of a very general nature, not specifically tied to a given sociology, politics, or even ontology and epistemology, even if it has a social history that can be traced and analyzed. That is, humanism consists of general tenets which overlap a number of different philosophical and political and social positions.

Novack collapses the general orientation of humanism as a concept into the specifics of its ideological trajectory and intellectual representatives, drawing the conclusion that those (in the Marxist camp, especially) who set their tents up under "Humanism" are decent progressives but deficient from the standpoint of Marxism, which for Novack means scientific socialism, where they should be setting up their tents.

But I would not make such an argument, first of all because my recommendations for people would have something to do with the actual claims they are making and their purposes for making them, and with respect to my purposes in interacting with them. But my purposes in interacting with people are not driven in all circumstances by schnorring for a particular political or theoretical position.

When you make reading recommendations, you have to take into account the presuppositions of the author and of the audience, and it is unwise to sic Novack on people without explaining where he is coming from first. I don't think Novack is the ideal introduction for people, because there is a lot assumed that should not be assumed in an introductory presentation.

(3) There is a Mattick Sr. and a Mattick Jr. and I am not clear whether their positions differ. But I'll go out on a limb. Mattick (I'll assume both for now) is not only anti-Stalinist, but also not a Trotskyist. His position is more radically different and he probably fits in closer to council communism and the state capitalism position, for those who know what these terms mean.

Mattick paints the ideological history of capitalism and its relation to humanism with a broad brush, and probably not for an entirely uninitiated audience.

Mattick then proceeds to the young, humanist Marx and then stresses his shift. For those who don't know, this means the shift from Marx in 1844 to Marx in 1845-6, as expressed in The German Ideology. And so we come to the end of Part II of Mattick's essay.

Now I don't disagree with his sketch, except for one subtle point, which may be difficult to explain in this brief post. When Mattick contrasts Marx's shift from a general position on human nature to a view on social humanity from the perspective of class society and class struggle, he is correct, sort of, but there's a very dangerous lacuna, a hole which countless people have fallen into. There's a shift in the level of abstraction. The old abstract humanism becomes invalidated, but I emphasize that this is so from the vantage point of a level of abstraction which functions at a level of explanation.

That is to say, I don't see abstract philosophical statements as worthy of being discarded once they are discredited as foundational explanatory positions. Philosophical general statements are still legitimate as long as they don't pretend to be social explanations. That's all I can say in the course of one post.

Mattick's take on "socialist humanism" is a cut above Novack's, because Mattick does not share the assumptions of orthodox Trotskyism which sees Stalinist states as degenerated workers' states.

However, Mattick fails to deliver the punchline on socialist humanism. I'm assuming he must think it a reaction which is limited, but from a theoretical and political base different from that of Novack.

But, in my view, like Novack, Mattick sees "humanism" as an inadequate position, because it only deals with alienation in general, not in its theoretically adequate social specificity.

While I don't exactly disagree, I don't exactly agree either. Why not? Because I conceive the relation between general philosophical statements and theoretical adequacy different from both gentlemen, because I recognize different levels of abstraction which can both work when not confused with one another.

What does this mean on a more down-to-earth level? It means the far left gives me a royal pain up my ass, whether it be Trotskyism, council communism, . . . or anarchism. Politically, I despise all these people (except Chomsky), while I can engage them on a more general critical level (though 99.9& of anarchists are idiots, and the other 0.1 % are analytically limited, and that includes Chomsky.)

I'm warning that texts such as these by Novack and Mattick should not be inflicted on an unsuspecting public without thinking through what one hopes to accomplish in doing so. Too much is being assumed.

I don't like the far left because its politics are childish. There is a lack of mediation between their abstract positions and real world interventions. Which means, in the context of the secular humanist movement under discussion, that there is a lack of mediation between general positions on Marxism and on its relationship to humanism, and on the relationship of both to practical political action.

(4) As a counterweight to Novack and Mattick, I heartily recommend two books I have just read, both by Stephen Eric Bronner:

(1) Reclaiming the Enlightenment,
(2) Ideas in Action.

Both deal with ideological and political history. The first leans more towards the general ideas of interest to us, because of the inherent interconnection between the Enlightenment and humanism. The second delves more into political philosophies and their practical histories.

Now as a nitpicker I have some philosophical subtle criticisms of Bronner, but in the less esoteric realm I broadly agree. The punchline is that Bronner has an animus against far left romanticism, and he reminds me why I can't stand these people, even though I have just as little patience with conventional liberals and thoughtless realpolitik.