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.

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.

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.

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois on Religion (4): Edward J. Blum's theological conversion of Du Bois

Written 20-21 April 2009:

Check out the publisher's description of:

Blum, Edward J. W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. viii + 273 pp. Notes, index, acknowledgements. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8122-4010-3. http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14316.html

You should note something very fishy here.

Now the fact that Du Bois wrote sermons, poems, etc., and that he recognized the "spiritual" qualities of religious culture, does not make him a religious person whose secular thought should be re-spun in religious terms. And if you doubt that there's something dishonest about Blum's agenda, see this interview:

RD10Q: W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet
By Edward J. Blum
June 19, 2008 (Religion Dispatches)
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/307/rd10q:_w.e.b._...

Blum's agenda is overtly religious. I'm nauseated to read this interview. Furthermore, it is symptomatic of an intellectual degeneration permeating every area of thought. Important fields of study are being corrupted by either postmodernism or a theological turn. The very secularity of scholarship is under de facto assault by irrationalism.

The irrationalist colonization of academia proceeds apace. Du Bois is being converted from a secular to a religious thinker in the most disgusting fashion. Another example: a new book titled The Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections, edited by Ed Blum and Jason R. Young.

See this blog puffing the book:

Thursday, February 19, 2009
Du Bois and Religion
by Phillip Luke Sinitiere
http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2009/02/du-bois-and-religion.html

Reportedly this volume has been praised by both James Cone, architect of black power theology, and Manning Marable, veteran Marxist scholar.

This blog is a document of a long-standing campaign to spiritualize intellectual history including Du Bois' intellectual achievements:

http://usreligion.blogspot.com/search/label/DuBois

I have unearthed some more positively sickening examples of Edward Blum's agenda for recasting Du Bois as a religious thinker, enlisting him in the service of theocratic progressives.

W.E.B. Du Bois and Religion
Revising perceptions of the influential African American thinker.
Reviewed by Kathryn Lofton | posted 12/15/2008
Books and Culture: A Christian Review
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/columns/bookoftheweek/081215b.h...

Religion and the Sociological Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois
by Edward J. Blum
Sociation Today, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2005
http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/dubois/blum.htm

7-16-07, History News Network
What Barack Obama (and the Democratic Party) Can Learn About Religion from W. E. B. Du Bois
By Edward J. Blum
http://hnn.us/articles/40530.html

What Would Du Bois Say?: A Response to Hitchens and Dawkins
Penn Press Log, May 11, 2007
http://pennpress.typepad.com/pennpresslog/2007/05/what_would_du_b.html

I think I'm going to barf. Now here is an extensive review:

W. E. B. Du Bois: A Spiritual Prophet and Religious Sage?
Reviewed for H-Amstdy by Curtis J. Evans, University of Chicago Divinity School.
Review of: Edward J. Blum. W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Amstdy@h-net.msu.edu (October 2007)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-AmRel&a...

The reviewer acknowledges the extensive engagement with religious metaphor on the part of Du Bois but questions Blum's premises. Note:

"By paying attention to the performative aspects of Du Bois's autobiographies and writings, Blum is able to avoid traditional biographical questions such as whether or not Du Bois "believed" in God, the psychological and social bases of his belief or unbelief, and how his personal religion changed over time (pp. 15-16)."

"Although Blum successfully makes the point that most historians and biographers have been too eager to depict Du Bois as a dogmatic atheist or agnostic, I am not sure that Blum appreciates why Du Bois has been regarded as an atheist or agnostic. Blum's own analysis indicates the persistent criticisms of religion that Du Bois uttered throughout his long life. Although, he accounts for this by making a few remarks about Du Bois's normative or idealized conception of "true Christianity," I do not think this will persuade most specialists that this is the best way to understand Du Bois's animus against religion as it existed during his lifetime (not as "religion" may have been in some idealized ahistorical realm). At one point, Blum comes close to getting at a better description of Du Bois and his religious sentiments when he briefly notes that Du Bois regularly minimized the supernatural in his reimagining of religion and should therefore be seen as a religious modernist (p. 160). I have always felt that this is a much more fitting description of Du Bois in light of his constant criticisms of black churches for their alleged backwardness and puritanical prohibitions, and his scathing critiques of white churches for their failure to treat blacks fairly.[2] Du Bois's emphasis on ethics at the expense of traditional doctrines and theology places him firmly in the religious modernist or Protestant liberal camp. If Blum had set out to argue that Du Bois was a religious modernist rather than an atheist or agnostic, I think his book would have been richer and this approach would have taken the unnecessary edge off the book in its strong stance against those who reportedly have underappreciated Du Bois's religiosity."

"Attention to Du Bois's literary works, his "religious imagination," and religious sentiments and descriptions expressed by those at his funeral and admirers of his books, while important and enlightening, does not satisfactorily demonstrate that he was a religious prophet (not to mention the problem of gaining any consensus on this ambiguous and highly personal term). After all, religious language and rhetoric are enormously difficult to link to personal behavior and religious practice (as modern-day elections and campaigning clearly indicate)."

This brief critical review seems to me like it sums up the issue very well, and is enough to discredit Blum's agenda as a liberal theocrat.

Finally, here is Blum's autobiographical confession:

Interview with Edward Blum on Du Bois, Posted by Eric Redmond on May 12, 2007.
http://ericredmond.wordpress.com/2007/05/12/16/

Edward Blum: "I grew up in a small white middle-class suburb of New York City where I attended a Presbyterian Church. I was active in the youth group and went to college intending to become a minister. The Christianity of my youth was inspiring. We were taught to think deeply about the sacred; to care about our community and others; we were taught to share the good news. What I did not realize, though, was that we were also being taught, subtly, that the people of God were all white. With all white people in the church and with visual depictions of white angels and Jesus in mass culture, I think I went to college with a subconscious belief that white people and white souls mattered most to God. I would not have said that at the time, but I think it was there. In college – at the University of Michigan – and then in graduate school – at the University of Kentucky – my entire religious view was changed. I encountered women and men of just about every national background, every hue, every persuasion, and I found that they had so much to teach me about God, about community, about justice and injustice, about how the world really was. At that point, I began a new spiritual pilgrimage: to find the faith that had been shielded from me in white suburbia. And, since I was always interested in history, I did so through historical texts. I began with Frederick Douglass, reading his grand personal narratives of slavery and freedom; I moved on to the liberation theology of James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts; I then read white evangelicals like sociologist Michael Emerson who were searching for ways for true racial integration. Then I found Du Bois and my entire mental landscape was opened. He seemed to unlock the doors separating religion and American society. He showed the connections between what and how people practice their faiths and the implications on society. So, in many ways, I am a white man who practices a black-based Christianity; politically, I am a Democrat; I focus on community over individualism; I see the work of God in the marginalized of the nation and of the world."

White liberal guilt explains it all!

W. E. B. Du Bois on Religion (2): The Negro Church

The Negro Church: Report of a Social Study Made under the Direction of Atlanta University; Together with the Proceedings of the Eighth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, May 26th, 1903. Edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, with [new] introduction by Phil Zuckerman, Sandra L. Barnes, and Daniel Cady. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003. ISBN 0759103283, 9780759103283. 212 pp.

And see this review:

McCowin, David. Review of Bois, W. E. B. Du, ed., The Negro Church: Report of a Social Study Made under the Direction of Atlanta University; Together with the Proceedings of the Eighth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, May 26th, 1903. H-AmRel, H-Net Reviews. July, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9611

Note these extracts from the review:

"The data collected regarding black preachers' conduct was a scathing indictment of church leadership. A typical response, from one of the "Intelligent Colored Laymen" surveyed in Georgia, answered the question "Are the ministers good?" as follows: "Out of ten, three are sexually immoral, one drinks, three are careless in money matters" (p. 64)."

"Du Bois criticized preachers' tendencies to stress preparation for the next life at the expense of the resolution of this life's problems."

"Was Du Bois, then, truly interested in the faith of a people or only the potential for political and social change between the races? In closing, he claimed the former "religious and moral qualities are independent of the eventualities of the race problem; no matter what destiny awaits the race, Religion is necessary either as a solvent or as a salve" (p. 208). However, Du Bois, who by 1903 had abandoned the religious beliefs which characterized his early years, in fact, had little patience for theology and tended to distrust any evidence dealing specifically with faith."

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.

The Big Religion Problems…Solved!

“The Big Religion Problems . . . Solved!” w/Gregory S. Paul
Equal Time For Freethought, Show 291, Jan. 18, 2009

The point of departure is paleontologist Gregory S. Paul's article "Religion, the Big Questions Finally Solved" in Free Inquiry, Dec. 2008/Jan. 2009 (vol. 29, no. 1), pp. 24-36.

Paul finds that Rodney Stark's hypothesis that religion thrives in the USA as opposed to Western Europe because of the free market and the absence of an established church is disconfirmed by accurate data. Serious religiosity decreases with rise of income and education. The USA is an anomaly with respect to other nations of comparable technological, industrial and political status.

Scientific analysis can refute the existence of a good God as well as other supernatural entities. Why then creationism and high religiosity in USA? Income disparity correlates with religiosity. We need universal health care and a social safety net. Corporate consumer culture tends to dampen religiosity. Polls show that Americans are becoming more progressive and secular. But is organized political power equivalent to raw numbers? Nevertheless, a look at the popular culture war shows that the right has effectively lost the culture wars.

But what about rise of progressive evangelicals? Paul responds that even they are helping to undermine religiosity. It is likely not accidental that the religious right opposes universal health care. But they will prove to be ineffective in the end. William F. Buckley was a fool to ally the religious right with corporate America, which undermines its culture. Opposite to Darwinism (creationism) and social Darwinism cannot coexist. Note that William Jennings Bryan did not ally the two. (Another example of capitalist culture: the decline of "blue laws".)

Religion is easily cast off. Make life secure and comfortable; religion will decline. Religion is a superficial way of dealing with hardship. Religion is not an intrinsic need.

The "new atheists"? The intellectual battle between religion is not essentially an ideological war, but a socioeconomic one. The corporate consumer culture enables the new atheists.

Paul's work will become one chapter in a forthcoming book, Atheism and Secularity.

COMMENT: While I agree with this correlation in general, the analysis of it doesn't seem to go deep enough; a more elaborate theoretical analysis is needed. A dialectical relationship has been revealed without being recognized as such. Progress does not merely eclipse regress; rather, exacerbated social tension tends to lead toward a social explosion or social breakdown. Perhaps Barack Obama has made Paul more hopeful? I remain skeptical of Paul's prognosis. I welcome Paul's thesis regardless, as it shows that social welfare and social equality are key to our problem, and therefore libertarian atheists deserve a good ass-kicking.

Religion, economic insecurity & social inequality

Very interesting commentary and interchange on the Pharyngula blog:

The trends, IF they continue, are in our favor

Commentators debate the causes of the differences in religiosity between Americans and West Europeans and the correlation because economic security, social equlity, and the decline of religion. Even the name of Karl Marx is brought up, though he is anathema in the USA and perhaps in other parts of the English-speaking world as well.

Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC)

Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC) could prove to be quite an important resource. The institute has issued some interesting publications, and several texts can be found online.

I mentioned David Hollinger's essay in a previous entry. For an introduction to the symposium see:

A NEW ACADEMIC ENTERPRISE
By Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar.

One important publication is Secularism & Secularity: Contemporary International Perspectives. See the Introduction online.

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.

Chris Hedges & left theocrats today

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chris Hedges, New York: The Free Press, 2006.
Reviewed by Gregory Zucker
Logos 7.1 - winter 2008
http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_7.1/zucker.htm

Note some telling statements from this review:

"While providing a few insights and interesting anecdotes, he never moves beyond description into the realm of solid analysis."

"Each chapter begins with a tone-setting quote from a political thinker on the appeal of fascism or else from a theologian espousing the Christian beliefs that Hedges argues represent the true essence of Christianity in contrast to its widespread right-wing perversion."

"Hedges’ treatment would have benefited greatly by bringing in Marx, Durkheim, Weber, or Freud, to name only a few preceding analysts of this sort of angst or anomie. These thinker understood that modernity decimates religion’s capacity to explain or ‘enchant’ the world. At the same time, modernity increases religion’s appeal as a shield should society fail to shield people from harmful repercussions. Unrestrained capitalism, social fragmentation, and bureaucratization are only a few of modernity’s products that, in the absence of social forces buffering their effects, might drive people back into the eager arms of the priest, rabbi, or mullah."

"Rather than undertake a critique of religion, Hedges compares the religious right to non-religious movements."

"Ironically, Hedges does argue for upholding the Enlightenment values that engendered modernity, but is unclear exactly what aspects of the Enlightenment need to be upheld. The religious right’s success is due in no small way to the fact that it embraced two legacies of the Enlightenment: capitalism and liberalism. It aligned itself with capital and used liberal language to defend the right of its flock to doctrinaire belief. What it vehemently opposes is the Enlightenment’s ethical vision and devotion, if that’s the word, to reason. These legacies are problematic for Hedges too since part of his program for confronting the religious right is a renewal of progressive Christianity. The rub is that the Enlightenment, and the modernity it helped usher in, poses a challenge to faith in general, not just to one specific politicized manifestation of it."

"Hedges is not only a journalist, but a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. So perhaps the book might offer an immanent critique of the movement. There is an argument to be made that modernity and faith can be reconciled, that is, if Hedges had given progressive theologians like Niebuhr more attention. But Hedges doesn’t bother to expose internal contradictions in evangelical arguments. Instead, he tells readers to accept that “God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable.” (p. 8) Recommended is the Christianity that Hedges’ says informed his father, a progressive pastor, in support of the Civil Rights Movement, homosexuals, and opposition to the Vietnam War. "

"Hedges is correct to fear the threat that the movement poses to democracy. But, sharing anecdotes and describing a few features of the movement does little to help. The real task is to provide viable solutions for confronting the movement, which Hedges fails to do. This cannot be done without more studies that explain why this socio-historical moment has produced a successful Christian fundamentalism and requires a multi-leveled analysis that engages the history, sociology, politics, and ideology of the movement. Of course, the most difficult part is providing reasons for why these faithful should embrace a progressive political alternative instead."

This is a rather polite critique of Hedges' faulty perspective. I attended here in DC Hedges' book talk on American Fascists. He conspicuously omitted any mention of secular humanists and atheists as part of an anti-fascist coalition. He's making the rounds again with his new book I Don't Believe in Atheists, basically a defamatory assault on the "new atheists" such as Dawkins, Hitchens, etc., labelling them "fundamentalists" as others are now doing.

Here's a slightly edited piece I wrote on his crowd in the wee hours this morning:

In re:
"God's Politics?" by Katha Pollitt
http://www.somareview.com/godspolitics.cfm

The religious leftists of today are quite different from their forbears: today's crop consists of frightened, opportunistic theocrats exploiting the collapse of liberalism and radicalism and attempting to capitalize on the hegemony of theocratic discourse instead of contenting themselves with adding a religious voice to a secular conversation as happened in yesteryear. I will have more to say about other such ideological charlatans as Chris Hedges. It is important to understand the distinction I've made as we approach the 40th anniversary of the heartbreaking assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, a man of quite a different caliber than the characters prancing around today.

Pollitt points out the lapses in Wallis' argument. It is also important to note the authoritarianism of Wallis' politics. There is, for example, a difference between MLK who injected religious metaphors and imagery into secular arguments in the public sphere and today's religious left who arrogate to themselves the right to order us around based on their version of scriptural authority, telling us what God commands, and predicating public policy and governmental action on a theological basis.

I should add that as obnoxious as devotees of other religions are, such as the Jewish liberal blowhard Michael Lerner, minorities are not majorities. Many Jews retain the psychology of a persecuted minority, while these Christian "progressive" ideologues embody all the arrogance of a majority assuming the right to cow everyone else. But all these m-f's deserve to be put in their place.

Freedom from Religion: An Interview with Alexander Saxton

Written 5 January 2007:

Freedom from Religion: An Interview with Alexander Saxton by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, MR Zine, 9 Nov 06

This interview is overall quite good, and provides a welcome alternative to the asociological, ahistorical liberal crap that dominates the anti-religion best seller list now—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and above all, Sam Harris. If only Saxton could get their kind of publicity with his new book Religion and the Human Prospect.

I must call attention to my one quibble, with Saxton’s conception of ideology.

Mannheim expressed precisely this view in the title of his famous book, Ideology and Utopia. Ideology, for Mannheim, was the manipulation of ideas, including religious ideas, by which exploiters maintained their dominance. Utopia, in Mannheim’s terms, was the yearning of the oppressed to overthrow or transcend their oppressors. Marx and Engels, focusing on class as the dynamic of historical change, argued that clerical hierarchies —priesthoods —because religion gives them access to social power and wealth, tend to align ideologically with the ruling class.

To identify Mannheim’s view with Marx’ and Engels’ is all wrong. Ideology is not just the manipulation of ideas to maintain class dominance, though that is part of it. Ideology is the necessary mystification of the nature of the world and social structure on the part of dominated, dominators, and the intellectual mediators of society (whatever their conscious loyalties), defined originally by Marx as “inverted” consciousness.

Marxists identified religion as ruling-class ideology.

Saxton should be careful with his language. What is implied here? “Identified” suggests identity or equivalence, though it could merely mean attribution in a functional sense. “Identified” does not necessarily mean “defined”. And I think this is not necessarily true that Marxists have always thought this way, whatever Saxton’s statement means. Of course, in popular agitation, religion can be easily attacked as a device to pull the wool over people’s eyes, as institutionally, it is so demonstrably harmful, and cognitively, an obstacle to a scientific analysis of society and the world. But it is not at all self-evident that Marxists, however anti-religious, simply equated religion with priestcraft.

But anti-clericalism falls short of examining belief itself. Even Marx’s celebrated description of religion as “the opium of the people” remains relatively useless for explanatory purposes. Ruling classes of course use religion to their own advantage but where does the religion come from? Did they invent it? How? When? Marxists say (and this certainly is accurate) that religion generates priesthoods which, because they wield great social power, tend to merge into the ruling class and bestow tokens of divine approval on ruling-class strategies. Whence comes the social power of religious hierarchies?

This is all true as far as it goes, but it may create a distorted impression. “Opium of the people” in actuality is the least revealing and productive, though most provocative, phrase in the passage in which Marx states it. Marx did not in fact define religion thus, though he did sum religion up as a popular epistemology, ending with this functional attribution.

Yes, it is important to know that religion often performs the star role in ruling-class ideology. Yet, to understand anything about religion itself as a historical phenomenon, one needs to dig deeper psychologically, and further back in evolutionary time. This poses a conceptual problem, especially for Marxist-oriented historians and anthropologists. To identify religion with ideology shuts off access to this sort of deeper research. Why? Because the concept of ideology is linked to that of class —it forms part of the apparatus of class conflict —and class is generally thought to have entered history at the same time as division of labor. But the division of labor could only have occurred after thousands of years of cultural evolution, somewhere near the end of the hunter/gatherer stage. By this reckoning, human societies would have had to wait a long, long time before ruling-class ideology finally introduced them to religion.

This is all dandy except that Saxton introduces a false premise: that ideology is completely encapsulated in the notion of class distinction and hence domination. I don’t have the textual evidence handy, but I don’t think even Marx and Engels limited themselves in this way, but even if they did, it’s just plain wrong. ‘Ideology’ with or without religion couldn’t make any sense if it arises only out of class domination, which didn’t just pop out by magic, either, if you’ll excuse the expression.

Therefore, an analysis of where Marxists have gone wrong, if they have, should not be distracted in this fashion. From what I have seen, the mainstream atheist propaganda of liberal democracies tends to be rather simple-minded, whereas at least Marxist perspectives analyze how ideological phenomena operate both conceptually and institutionally. I don’t know where Saxton got his information, but it is just not so that Marxists simply operate with a dichotomy of religion as either bad (deception) or good (popular movements, liberation theology). At their worst they tend to do whatever it takes to pander, or in the case of Stalinist regimes, to legitimate their own rule. Liberation theology is the worst form of pandering, dishonest in the extreme, and in Latin America, the product of an historically specific pathology. This kind of thinking betrays an excessively instrumentalist approach to ideas: whose ass to I have to kiss in order to get people’s attention, or how do I have to manipulate them to get them to kiss mine?

Oddly, Saxton talks here like a mainstream liberal, though he is obviously much smarter.

Religious ideologies & the social order, secularization theory & cross-cultural studies

Written 1 January 2007:

I have learned a lot over the past few years from studies of the history of New Age thought, the western appropriation of the philosophies of India, China, and Japan, and cross-cultural studies of religion and mysticism, particularly comparing India and the West. Sources can be found at the bottom section of my atheism web guide. Let me also point out my recently published book review:

Dumain, Ralph. “Secularism, science and the Right” [Review: Nanda, Meera. The Wrongs of the Religious Right: Reflections on Science, Secularism and Hindutva. Gurgaon (Haryana), India: Three Essays Collective, July 2005. 118 pp. ISBN paper 81–88789–30–5. http://www.threeessays.com/titles.php?id=18], Frontline [India’s National Magazine from the publishers of The Hindu], Volume 23, Issue 24, Dec. 02–15, 2006.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2324/stories/20061215000507400.htm

I experienced a sudden insight at the tail end of a four-day philosophy conference, just concluded:

The American Philosophical Association
Eastern Division One Hundred Third Annual Meeting,
Washington, DC, December 27—30, 2006
http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/divisions/eastern/

It happened during this session:

VIII-K. Special Session Arranged by the APA Committee on the Status of Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies
Topic: Tensions in the Making of “Self” Across Cultures: Some Themes Invoking Interactive Prospects

Chair: P. M. John (Westfield State College)
Speakers: David R. Schiller (Independent Scholar)
“Moral Leaders, Practical Harmonics, and Moral Delight”
Ifeanyi Menkiti (Wellesley College)
“‘I Am Because We Are’—A Traditional Answer to a Modern Question?: Reflections on the Hermeneutics of ‘Self’ in African Culture”
Brad Art (Westfield State College)
“A ‘Suffering’ Job in Search of his ‘Self’: An Existential Encounter in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition”
P. M. John (Westfield State College)
“The Samsaric, the karmic, and the Real ‘Self’ in Hinduism: From an Illusory World to the Real Brahman through a Reciprocal Karma”

The program was shuffled around a bit, but I was there for three presentations—on the cosmological and religious beliefs concerning the self in Hinduism (India), the Book of Job (Old Testament), and traditional sub-Saharan African societies. This session was absolutely fascinating, because I learned not only what was taught but something extra that was not: how to relate religious ideologies to the social structures from which they are derived. This latter element was left out of the talks entirely and I interjected it after each talk. However, the self-contained systematic presentation of each of these belief systems was highly illuminating.

The analysis of the Book of Job revealed subtleties in Old Testament Judaism I had never appreciated before, also giving me a new perspective with which to criticize it I had never dreamed of before. The treatment was so subtle and nuanced I should repeat it in detail, as there are some deep lessons to be learned about the structure and motivation of the belief system of the ancient Hebrews and their relation to their god. There was, however, no mention made of the real historical circumstances under which the Book of Job was written or was admitted into the canon.

I was always puzzled why Meera Nanda (see my book review above) treated Hinduism unfavorably in comparison to the monotheistic religions of the Middle East. Listening to the exposition this afternoon, I finally realized why Hinduism is the most horrible religion ever devised by man. Comparing these belief systems, it became clear to me that Hinduism is absolutely the worst of all of them, and I let the speaker on the subject have it with both barrels. He was not inclined to defend it, but he was unable to say anything in response. Then another member of the audience, who looked like he may have been from that part of the world, went on by citing some horrors from the Laws of Manu.

The African speaker was more general in his characterization of conceptions of the self in traditional African societies, but the organization of village life and the role of the ancestors (the deceased) gave at least a broad context to the social function of their belief systems.

You can learn a great deal from the internal conceptual structure of these world views, but you cannot truly understand them without measuring them up to the social orders they are designed to stabilize. But you must also not simply view them as irrelevant disorganized effluvia or mumbo jumbo whose content is entirely arbitrary. The key is in the interaction between the ideologies and their societies, and the role that superstition plays in the relations connecting the known and the unknown, the facts of existence and a regulative conception of Right. I’m not saying anything new, but I spontaneously realized how to apply this insight in any situation that calls for it.

And then I had another sudden insight as to just how worthless Dawkins and Dennett and Sam Harris really are in explaining anything about how ideologies are created, structured, and passed on in societies. There is nothing there. It’s as if every society that ever was is structured like a free market in which some advertising (meme) is more attractive and memorable than another. It is just that childish. Dawkins simply doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t know anything. And he is ideologically determined in a way of which he is totally unconscious, which is just what ideology is. It’s not like I didn’t realize it before, but now it was suddenly clear as to how an approach to the subject matter must be entirely different.

And there is also a reason why the groupies of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris are as ignorant as they are. They know they hate religion, superstition, authoritarianism, ignorance, dishonesty, hypocrisy, stupidity, and delusional thinking—which is not to be sneezed at!—but the problem is, they don’t really have a handle on anything else about society and ideas. In other words, atheists in America are just like other Americans. Maybe this should be a selling point: “We are just like you, only slightly less clueless.”

I have started out the new year reading about theories of secularization and their application to different societies and historical periods. And then it hit me that this is what we need in our milieu. This is the missing link.

As far as I can tell, we are on two different tracks that converge or diverge in confusing ways, which I will now enumerate in a simplified fashion as extremes:

(1) separation of church and state (religion and government),

(2) agitation for (a) atheism or (b) the public acceptance of atheists.

While (1) and (2b) are compatible, (1) and (2a) sometimes work at cross-purposes. When you interact with the public, do you really want to get caught up in arguing about the existence of a god when other priorities take precedence? There are of course, gradations of issues in between, from issues of secularization and reason in the public sphere to the problems of revealed religions and superstitions. This middle ground, in addition to church-state separation, is our real battlefield. The assault on “God” as an abstract concept is only of significance in (a) its conflation with specific religious systems, beliefs, and institutions, (b) its role in pseudoscience, (c) the incompatibility of the anthropomorphic attributes of God with what scientific knowledge has taught us about the universe.

In addition to all the arguments we need to muster to combat ignorance in all these areas, we need to understand more about the relation of superstitions to social forces, and thus we need to attend to comparative studies and especially theories of secularization and desecularization. For this purpose, we have to push Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Shermer out of our way, for they are not only useless but positively harmful.