William R. Jones, Jr. on Black liberation theology: Mao, Martin, or Malcolm?

This is an old essay. I see no indication of an earlier publication, so perhaps this is the first time it appeared; on the other hand, the subject matter suggests it was written at least a decade earlier:

Jones, William R. "Liberation Strategies in Black Theology: Mao, Martin, or Malcolm?", in Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917, edited by Leonard Harris (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1983). pp. 229-241.

This concern belongs to an earlier era, but given the key role that Jones played in countering black liberation theology from within and furthering black participation in the philosophy profession, this is worth revisiting if only for the limitations of Jones's perspective, which Stephen Ferguson correctly characterized as Feuerbachian.

Jones triangulates the three key figures on their attitude to violence. Mao and Martin Luther King, Jr. are polar opposites: Mao claims that power grows out of the barrel of a gun and thus violence is the only means to fundamental change, while King categorically eschews violence as counter-productive. Malcolm X's formulation "by any means necessary" avoids either of these extremes: Malcolm advocates violence for self-defense or when all other means are exhausted, but not as a first principle.

Jones finds that black liberation theology has gravitated away from both King and Mao and has veered closer to Malcolm X. But he doesn't say anything further about black theology, as the real purpose of this article is to criticize King.

It is obvious to the average person, I would think, that all other things being equal, Malcolm's position would be the most rational and aligned with the real world. If a philosophical position on violence were the only thing that distinguished these three figures, Jones would have a good argument. But their overall political positions and relation to their own traditions differ in several ways, such that Jones's comparison ends up being superficial. We don't even learn what differentiates King's orientation from the asceticism and social backwardness of Gandhi, or Mao's vulgar nationalistic version of class struggle from the intellectual depth of Marx. Nor do we gain any knowledge about the rest of Malcolm X's politics and what he learned once he separated himself from Elijah Muhammed's petit bourgeois fascist religious cult.

A deeper analysis of King's politics might also give additional insight into what differentiates King's universalist radical Christianity from the parochial vision of the black liberation theology of James Cone et al ideologically aligned with the black power movement. King's ideological illusions aside, there is one key aspect of King's political strategy overlooked here. Once the initial legislation was passed putting an end to legal Jim Crow in the South, King turned to the intractable problems of de facto institutional racism in the rest of the country, also implicated in the perpetuation of poverty. King realized that he had to tackle the entire institutional structure of American society, rather than to carve out a petit bourgeois enclave within the black ghetto. King took a bullet for black garbagemen; at the same time King was in the process of organizing a pan-racial Poor People's Campaign

To overlook this superior aspect of King's social vision over the parochialism of black nationalism (which should not be equated with "black power" as an abstract concept) is to do a major injustice to any evaluation of political actors of the 1960s. If one wishes to pursue a critique of King's politics, the proper focal point would not be his religiously-inflected pacifism, but the perspectives for the Poor People's Campaign and what it could or could not lead to.  But now back to Jones.

Jones quotes from King's Gandhi-inspired philosophy of nonviolence, for example, by allowing violence to be inflicted on oneself refusing to strike back, one eventually shames the perpetrator. Jones convincingly demonstrates that this is nonsense, as well as the argument that a violent defensive response to violence can only perpetuate a cycle of violence. There is another aspect of a nonviolent strategy that Jones fails to consider, which is not the effect of nonviolence on one's direct oppressors, but on public opinion. (A historical fact once forgotten but recently brought to public attention in at least one new book: that many of the very same people involved in nonviolent public demonstrations had their guns ready at home to defend themselves against racist assaults.) If the public also has no conscience, then of course the situation becomes even more difficult.

The substance of Jones's case against the philosophy (call it metaphysics) of nonviolence begins on page 236. The ridiculousness of Gandhi's argument becomes evident, for example, in its practical refutation by the example of Nazi Germany. The Gandhian perspective ignores the fact that when the oppressor has classified different groups into the human and the subhuman, no appeal to conscience is possible (237). Another crucial defect of Gandhianism is its focus on the psychological, which overlooks the material imbalance of power. Violence can only be understood when contextualized, which involves configurations of power (238). Jones also points out the selective reception of King's views and the rejection of King's philosophy when it came to criticizing the Vietnam War (239). Jones also points out that King failed where Gandhi succeeded because black Americans constitute a minority, the reverse of the situation in India (235).

The black theologians' reaction against King is related to King's notion of Christian self-sacrificing love connected with his philosophy of nonviolence, which by the late 1960s was seen as ineffective.
In this essay Jones stops here, rather than proceeding onward to reject all theology as obscurantist. Elsewhere in Jones's work we learn that he is a religious humanist rather than an atheist per se, and his war against the (liberation) theology of revealed religion takes the form of an immanent critique using theodicy, or the problem of evil, as a linchpin, hence the key question embodied in the title of his book, Is God a White Racist?. It is also worth noting that Jones treats "white society" as a concept, rather than developing a social theory that would root white supremacy as a ruling class formation having grown out of the institutionalization of slavery as a foundation of the power and wealth of the emerging bourgeoisie. Again, Stephen Ferguson is the only aficionado of Jones who has recognized Jones's position as essentially Feuerbachian, opposing ideology within the realm of ideology without grounding it in a social theory.

Jones to his credit does take into account the other aspect of King's political philosophy: King acknowledges the validity of the exercise of power; nonviolent resistance does not appeal to conscience alone; it succeeds by making existing society ungovernable (234-235). In the footnotes (240-241), Jones quotes King emphasizing the exercise of power beyond the tactics of moral suasion. While some look at this as a later alteration of King's initial position, Jones rejects this interpretation. Quoting Vincent Harding, Jones maintains that King never fully incorporated an analysis of power into his thought, hence never crossed over into the terrain of "black power". Perhaps, but one might question to what extent the advocates of black power were able to craft an effective political strategy given the constraints of being a minority basing themselves in the ghetto facing the overwhelming might of police state violence. Ultimately, who had the more realistic and more profound political vision?

Religion & Hate (2)

Regarding the group discussion of Feb. 22 mentioned in the previous post: To the extent that there were different schools of thought or aspects of the question represented in this discussion, here is how the various opinions expressed cluster:

(1) Whatever there is to be said about ‘human nature’ or tendencies with or without religion towards hostility and dominance, religion specifically exacerbates this tendency or adds ingredients all its own.

• All religions make competing truth-claims.
  
• Religious truth claims are exclusive.
  
• Other belief systems are not only wrong, but constitute a threat.
  
• All orthodox (specifically Abrahamic) religions foster hatred of outgroups: there is a demonstrable correlation.
  
• In the distant past, there were local deities. Modern theism makes matters worse.
  
• Religion does not permit for testability of truth claims.
  
• Religion lends an absolute authority to prejudices.
  
• Religion is a map that bends reality to fit the map.

(2) Defense of religion or specific religions, and disputes over same occurred.

• Hate is only felt by individuals, not religions.
  
• Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are counter-examples of religion’s hatefulness.
  
• Buddhism is nonviolent. Various claims & counter-claims:
• Buddhism is philosophy not religion.
  
• Japanese Buddhism fed into Japanese nationalism.
  
• There is definitive documentation of Buddhist atrocities.
  
• Tibetan Buddhism is not what the fans of the Dalai Lama make it out to be.
  
• The American version of Buddhism is not the same as Buddhism in Asia.
• The Axial Age saw the birth of more humane belief systems.
  
• St. Paul instituted a major shift to cosmopolitanism.
  
• Stalinism was a secular religion.
  
• There is a universal attraction to religion: religion tells people how to live.

(3) Claims about human nature were rampant, and questions over the uniqueness of religion as a causal factor.

• The fundamental question is one of in-groups vs. out-groups.
  
• Religion is not more hate-inducing than other things.
  
• There are various pretexts & rationalizations. (In the case of religion, there’s an appeal to an absolute authority—an argument used by some against religion.)
  
• Religion is mixed in with cultural & other rivalries.
• Group conflict may be a perennial phenomenon, preceding religion.
  
• Experiments show that any differentiating factor can serve as a catalyst for the delineation of in and out groups.
  
• There are other ideologies of contention, especially nationalism.
  
• Someone asserted that gender is primary.
  
• Someone introduced the observation that “America” is a god.
  
• Do all groups inspire hate? Are aggression and violence universals?
  
• Several factors were put forward as stimulating aggressive tendencies:
• Population density.
  
• Pecking order: leaders start wars.
  
• Testosterone: young males are the main culprits.
  
• Males & females engage in difference types of conflict.
  
• Unattached males are most likely to be prone to warfare.

(4) What is the basis of morality? Is or can there be a science of morality?

• Religion is not necessary to morality.
  
• Relativism should be opposed.
  
• There is a difference between subjective & objective reasoning.
  
• There is the issue of the testability of claims.
  
• There is a scientific basis to morality.
  
• Morality is not a science yet, but there is progress. More study is needed to render morality scientific.

(5) Miscellaneous points:

• The inconsistencies in religion are exploited to different ends.
  
• An example of twisted reasoning is gratitude toward God for ‘sparing’ selected individuals from disasters in which many others perish.
  
• Missionaries have by and large been awful people.
  
• How does one weigh the good and bad aspects associated with religion?
  
• Something was said about Freud or psychoanalysis, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

(6) Definitional & methodological questions:

• What is meant by hatred? Does hatred = violence = war?
  
• Is preference hatred?
  
• Who gets to define what a religion is?
  
• Can one factor out religion from everything else?
  
• Someone oriented toward social science is not satisfied with exclusively biological explanations for socially/historically determinant phenomena.

Religion & Hate (1)

In preparation for a discussion this evening (22 Feb) on religion and hate, I sketched the following bulletin points. In a subsequent post I will list the bullet points of what was actually discussed.


(1) I always have a problem with the question of religion & causality, since religion itself is an expression of social (& psychological) forces.

(2) I think we have to go behind religion & begin with its origins in magical thinking, and thus the connection with dependency, fear & violence, beginning with the experience of violence in nature.

(3) As much as I dislike René Girard as a Christian apologist, his views adumbrated in  Violence and the Sacred should be examined, particularly the notion of ritual sacrifice as a substitute for unregulated violence.

(4) I think religion has to be historically divided at least into 3 stages: (1) primitive magic & tribal religion; (5) religion in pre-modern class societies, wherein all the "great" religions took shape; (6) religion in the modern world, & the inability to digest modernity, in which magical thinking proliferates in both religious & secular ideologies.

(5) Without understanding the cultural reinforcements of hate, violence, oppression & paranoia, I don't see how we could understand religion's connection to hate, or in some cases, religion's rebellion against hate. There is even one religion or two which is mostly benign, the Bahai's, for example.

(6) And then there's the question of self-hate. Why do the victimized think they have done something wrong?  Richard Wright addressed this question symbolically in his brilliant 1942 story, "The Man Who Lived Underground."

(7) References given here address different historical stages of superstitious / magical / paranoiac thinking. Girard addresses primitive religion. Edmund D. Cohen's The Mind of the Bible-Believer addresses the genesis and psychological mechanisms of thought control behind Christianity.  Consult the LABELS on this blog for more on both of these authors. For an example of modern paranoiac thinking, consult reviews of Stephen Eric Bronner's A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion.

Hypatia revisited

Written 12 January 2008:

Dzielska, Maria. Hypatia of Alexandria, translated by F. Lyra. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Interesting little book on the great mathematician/astronomer/philosopher Hypatia, torn to pieces by Christians in Alexandria, 415 AD. Much accepted as fact about Hypatia is actually the repetition of legend. This book reviews the literary history of Hypatia. She was a hero of the Enlightenment. Several writers of the period blamed St. Cyril for complicity in her assassination. (The first English writer to honor her was the heretical John Toland.) Hypatia became a symbol of Hellenism defiled by Christian fanaticism. She was also the subject of a novel in the 19th century by Charles Kingsley (of which I have two editions), a Protestant clergyman who wanted to sock it to the Catholics. In more recent years she has become a heroine of the feminists.

After reviewing this history, Dzielska assembles ascertainable historical data about her and her belief system, based on what can be learned by her disciples. I don't recall her relation to Christianity, but I believe she was most likely a Platonist who headed an esoteric circle rather than a public or itinerant teacher.

I paused after this point. The third chapter I think is about the circumstances of her death, and the fourth is the conclusion.

17 January 2008:

After reviewing the literary history of Hypatia and the ascertainable facts about her circle, the subsequent chapter is about her life and death, then a conclusion, finally a bibliographical supplement.

While portrayed as a beautiful young woman in literature, in reality Hypatia was probably born circa 355 AD and thus was murdered by a Christian mob at the age of 60. Her father was a noted mathematician and astronomer, and she carried on his work and added her own achievements. In addition, she was, as were other scientifically minded individuals of her time, heavily involved in hermeticism and esoteric teachings. An elite, upper class group constituted her circle. She was neither popular with the masses, nor was she a particularly avid defender of the traditional "pagan" religion.

Hypatia got caught up in the vicious religious politics of her time. When the patriarch Cyril (later sainted, natch) took over from Theophilus, he made aggressive efforts to wipe out paganism and Judaism, which destabilized an inherently precarious situation. Cyril incited violent, homicidal warfare between Jews and Christians, which ultimately resulted in an anti-Jewish pogrom devastating the Jewish presence in Alexandria. Furthermore, he locked himself into a power struggle with the pagan leader Orestes. Hypatia has friends in high places, both with Orestes and in the center of empire. Aloof from public life, she was set up as a scapegoat for the city's tensions. She was portrayed as a witch casting a spell over Orestes, preventing a rapproachment with the Christians. Cyril is known to have incited the climate of hate, but there is no evidence directly linking him to her assassination. However, a cabal of Christian leaders whipped up a lynch mob against her among the poor and ignorant yet obedient to the priesthood, and these people attacked and dismembered her in 415 AD.

Nothing like that Christian love, n'est ce pas?

Religion, Violence, Entitlement (1)

From the website Against the Grain, a radio program broadcast on KPFA-FM, a Pacifica Network Station. It is unfortunate that such a program could never be broadcast on the Washington DC Pacifica station WPFW, where illiteracy, backwardness, and provincialism rule.

6.08.10| Religion, Violence, Entitlement

The first half of this program is described as follows:

Ron Hassner confronts the argument that religions are naturally conducive to peace. He emphasizes, among other things, the ambiguous and contradictory nature of religious texts and passages.[33 min. of 60]

Hassner begins by trashing Richard Dawkins' infantile lack of political or historical sagacity involving religion. But he also makes short shrift of the self-serving proclamations of the defenders of religion that all religions are inherently peaceful. Religion is not a private affair between man and God as the Protestant tradition would have it. Religions are not detached metaphysical positions; they inherently make claims about space, time, and behavior. There is, however, a perpetual problem of the interpretation of sacred texts, with and without their internal contradictions, with and without translations in foreign languages. Literalism is an impossibility. Justifying any course of action, warlike or peaceful, based on sacred textual authority is necessarily dodgy. When it comes to skewed interpretations, though, Hassner finds Sam Harris especially guilty of irresponsible cherry-picking from the Koran. Part two of this interview is forthcoming.

René Girard: Violence and the Sacred

I never got around to completing my review of:

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Note also that there is a newer book continuing these thematics with contemporary political references:

Jeurgensmeyer, Mark, ed. Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World. London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1992. Publisher's description:

This book explores the relationship between symbolic violence and real acts of religious violence with reference to some of the most volatile religious and political conflicts in today's world. These involve the Hizbollah movement in Lebanon, the Sikhs in India, militant Jewish groups in Israel and Muslim movements from the Middle East to Indonesia. The contributors also respond to theoretical issues articulated by René Girard in his well-known book, Violence and the Sacred.

Here are some notes I wrote on Girard's book over the past few years.

* * * * *

Written 14 Jan 2006:

The article on Kant, Bataille, and Sacrifice [by David York] is just idiotic. This shows where francophilia will get you. BTW, Bataille was a member of the College of Sociology in the 1930s; there's an anthology of their writings translated into English. This group had a preoccupation with occult phenomena, ritual, the sacred, etc. Really creepy and in my opinion smacks of crypto-fascism.

If we're going to read French blowhards, I would prefer to engage René Girard's Violence and the Sacred. I've been intrigued by the title for years but have still not read it. There's an interview with Girard you can find online:

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/anthropoetics/AP0201/interv.htm

In our time, the ideology of sacrifice is the ideology of fascism and reached its apogee with Hitler.

If we are going to apprise irrationalist philosophy in relation to sacrifice and the violence and ignorance that underlies its ideology, we could also examine the major irrationalist philosophers of the modern age, e.g. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard wrote a notorious analysis of

Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, justifying this horrible barbarism. Note also Girard's treatment of Nietzsche.

Written 2 Nov 2007:

I've been keeping up with the new atheist books published this year, but the books that have most penetrated my thinking this year are not new.

The Mind of the Bible-Believer (Edmund G. Cohen)

Primitive Man as Philosopher (Paul Radin)

Violence and the Sacred (René Girard)

[. . . .] I first read Radin over 30 years ago and over the summer I felt the need to re-read it. Radin's goal 80 years ago was to dispel popular and anthropological biases about the cognitive abilities and orientation of "primitive man" to to prove the obvious: the capacity for individual thought, reflection, and criticism. Re-reading it though forced me into an anthropological mode I got out of decades ago. I have not yet finished Girard, having bogged down in his detailed analysis of the Greek classics which I really don't need.

. . . . .

You can't get a complete picture of where Girard is coming from from Violence and the Sacred alone. His colors are fully revealed in his other books. This book is about sacrifice as the origin and motive force of all religion, and sacrifice as a socially controlled deflection from the constant threat of an uncontrolled and uncontrollable escalating cycle of violence feared by humanity from its primitive ancestors onward. He begins with the belief systems and practices of "primitive" cultures and ancient civilizations. He spends several chapters on the ancient Greeks, convinced that critics have entirely misinterpreted the classics.

From all this you would not guess his views on Judaism and Christianity, or the fact that he is a Catholic and that he believes Christianity to be fundamentally different from all other religions, because it introduces a fundamental change into the nature of sacrifice.

You will get a fair summary of Girard's views and criticisms of them in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rene_Girard

Here you will already get an indication of how despicable Girard is, though there is much to be learned from this one book, and for all I know, from his others.

There are many links from this article alone, but somehow I got hooked up with this interview with René Girard by Markus Müller (Anthropoetics II, no. 1, June 1996):

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/anthropoetics/AP0201/interv.htm

There is an undertone of vileness in this piece as elsewhere that needs to be elucidated. Some bullet points:

(1) An anti-secular, anti-modern sensibility is at work;

(2) There is a reveling in the debased, violent, essence of man posited here--just the sort of mentality Catholicism thrives upon;

(3) There is no need to conceal the dirty secrets of human motivation; they merely confirm Girard's anti-humanist world-view;

(4) The reading of history is entirely metaphysical and psychological, even biomorphic--there is no real history here, only a mythic history;

(5) and it is combined with typical French intellectual conceits--Nietzcheanism, representation, mimesis--in the most obnoxious manner;

(6) concluding by reasoning about myth alone, that Christianity is fundamentally a mutation of the primordial mythical sacrificial logic rather than its (hypocritical) continuation.

This having been said, there is much to be gained from reading Violence and the Sacred. As a Catholic necrophile, Girard feels no need to conceal the debased violent nature of humanity; he claims that in religion there is no concealment of this at all--it's all right there in the open. There is a dampening of consciousness as to the real nature of sacrifice; indeed, reason is sacrificed in the act of sacrifice. But what seems rationally absurd makes perfect anthropological sense.

From these basic ideas Girard proceeds in endless detail, devoting a huge slice of the book to an analysis of Greek tragedy as an illustration of his ideas and a correction in his eyes of the fundamentally mistaken presuppositions of literary critics and classicists as to the nature of what it's all about.

For my interests, it's way too much detail, and my eyes tend to glaze over, but it is instructive in those moments in which I maintain focus. My interest is in the generalizations Girard articulates from time to time. These are the passages I have noted, and at some point I will type up short quotes which distill all this material into the general principles to be gleaned from it.

* * * * *

This year I've begun a survey of Marxist literature on religion. The Marxist understanding of ideology (esp. as a modern phenomenon) improves upon mainstream atheism, which, except for the appropriation of Darwinism (which excised teleology and natural theology from serious consideration), doesn't seem to have advanced beyond the 18th century. Yet I have my suspicion that the Marxist tradition (I'm excepting anthropology here) is not entirely satisfactory in its treatment of religion. In these excerpts I express my doubts:

Written 7 March 2008:

Last year I read two older books that had an impact on me, The Mind of the Bible-Believer by Edmund G. Cohen and Violence and the Sacred by René Girard. Even religious people today, ignorant and superstitious though they be, still live in a modern world predicated on assumptions quite different from the superstition-saturated environment that forms almost the entire history of the human race, and I think that this goes much deeper than the mechanisms referenced by Feuerbach and Marx, who were after all products of a liberal religious intellectual environment.

Written 13 June 2008:

I think, though, that this Marxian take, which probably follows in the footsteps of Feuerbach and atheized Christianity, erroneously persists in viewing popular religion solely as consolation, and not for what much of it is, a reproduction and intensification of the violence of nature and society which not just the ruling classes but the masses inflict on one another. As disgusting as René Girard's Catholicism is, he has emphasized the intrinsic link between violence and the sacred.

Written 13 July 2008:

I recently got a copy of a Alexander Saxton's Religion and the Human Prospect [. . .] Saxton suggests that Marxists missed the boat on religion for failure to differentiate it from modern ideologies. This is an interesting line I will pursue. After reading Edmund Cohen's The Mind of the Bible-Believer (Prometheus) and René Girard's Violence and the Sacred last year, I concluded that there's a depth of savagery that we moderns tend to forget because we are so acclimated to a technological society in which the world around us is automatically interpreted naturalistically, however bad our religious superstitions are.

Written 30 Dec 2008:

Furthermore, an exclusive class-against-class perspective ignores the multitude of functions and values that religion serves, including interpersonal control within classes, and the continuity of religion which predates not only the current but all manifestations of class society, and is ultimately rooted in primitive magical thinking. The notion of religion as merely the sigh of the oppressed creature and the heart of a heartless world is a limited notion rooted in the trajectory of liberalizing Protestantism. Religion is also rooted in magical thinking intertwined with fear, manipulation, cruelty, and viciousness. The picture of religion one gets from, say, Edmund G. Cohen's The Mind of the Bible-Believer or Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred is quite less benign than the Feuerbachian picture.

Written 29 March 2009:

Instead, I offer up Edmund G. Cohen's The Mind of the Bible-Believer as an entry point into the demented Christian mentality. And more generally, I suggest René Girard's Violence and the Sacred as an an additional antidote to the whitewashing of religious superstition by religious liberals (among whom I would count religious radicals, who are duplicitous in exactly the same fashion and from the same class standpoint).