Gender & race wars in the secular movement (1)

As a peripheral observer of the atheist/ humanist/ skeptics/ secularist movement, who only intermittently keeps up with goings-on in the movement and hardly ever reads the relevant blogs, I find my sense of reality challenged by the controversies raging within it, mostly over women's issues but also over racial issues, and of course the two combined. I have always found this movement (in the USA at least) so shallow that I cannot take seriously the terms of these debates, as the very people dissenting from the prevailing order of this movement are interested in claiming an identity in it, and this identity is something I don't believe in in the first place.

To claim oneself as a feminist skeptic or a black skeptic, for instance, to me means in the first place that however one redefines the issues, one has already accepted not only the labels but the tacit conceptual basis for these labels. While I do take seriously the issue of harassment and character defamation of women in the secular movement, I do not take so seriously the framing of the ideological issues within it. Its fundamental premises are bourgeois. This may not be so obvious because the dissenters represent or claim to represent progressive causes. However, the ideological basis of these causes and their relation to the context in which they operate changes over time.

It is difficult to see this because Americans have to confront two historical breaks which have instituted our historical amnesia: McCarthyism and Reaganism.  I gave the briefest outline of how this affects the tacit ideological underpinnings of the explicit ideological assertions of the humanist movement, in my previous post, John Shook & the banality of humanism's dead liberalism. I will quote just one paragraph, in which I distinguish the left liberals/soft socialists of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto from today's "liberals":

 All of these people were products of a different era from the generations that produced the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and '70s. In addition to class-based agitation, this period foregrounded the new social movements--black civil rights & black power (along with other mushrooming ethnic movements), feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, etc.  What survives of all this, however, is predicated on the destruction of the old social liberalism that was undergirded by the labor movement.  Hence what passes for liberalism now is not class-based social equality, but the equal right of members of marginalized groups to participate at all levels of class exploitation. Our black president is the logical outcome of this historical trend.

You can read the rest yourself. What I need to add is that the movements of the 1960's and '70s cannot simply be isolated as black, women's, gay, etc. movements. There existed an entire spectrum of political positions associated with each of these movements. And social class was alive as an issue in a different way than it is today, as the old social liberalism (welfare state capitalism cum industrial trade unionism) is dead as a political force. Hence the notion of what it means to be progressive today hinges on fighting the right-wing assault based on their "cultural issues": defending women's rights, black voting rights, the status of Latinos, etc. Of course there is also a battle on defending public service unions and the social safety net. Nevertheless, the framing of the battles on behalf of marginalized and discriminated-against groups is shaped by the overall political context of today.

What remains of the consideration of class is encompassed in the left bourgeois notion of intersectionality and the childish deployment of the concept of privilege. Study of the intersections of race and class and gender and class goes back a long way, but the framing of these issues is a result of the combination of progress and regress since the end of the 1970s: increased consciousness of the issues raised by the new social movements combined with the eclipse of class politics. As for privilege, this notion grew out of the radical '60s in the context of left-wing organizing confronting the labor movement. The concept is now reduced to privileged middle class professionals baiting ostensibly more privileged middle class professionals.

As for the actual marginalization of various groups within secularist etc organizations, others will have to testify. However, the situation is complicated not only by the gatekeeping practices of organizations, conference organizers, etc., and by explicit positions taken by public figures, but by the atmosphere of the blogosphere, social networking, and cyberspace generally. As for the debaters who are recognized public figures, to what extent are the debates artifacts of competing self-promoters as superficial in their pronouncements as their opponents? How much of the alleged "war on women" actually concerns the recognizable organized secularist etc. movement and how much the free-for-all of commenters on blogs and social networks and YouTube wars? The fact that harassment and character assassination should exist at all and must be endured or fought is itself depressing.  Why not just attack someone's half-baked ideas when the occasion arises, if that is what is really at stake, and leave it at that?

The freethought community, on matters of social/political thinking, is as shallow as the rest of American society. Social issues should certainly not be silenced or discouraged, but that doesn't mean everyone who brings them up is a genius. We live in a media-saturated environment in which everyone reacts to everything. but unfortunately superficiality dominates all discussions. It is typical of argument in America: he said-she said. Who wants to participate in such discussions ad nauseam?

George Novack on socialism & humanism, revisited

I broached this subject elsewhere in a previous post: Socialism & Humanism: Novack & Mattick.

Recently, in the process of googling, I came across this piece:

Psychoanalysis and the “empty place” of psychology within Marxism by Frank Brenner
http://www.permanent-revolution.org/essays/marxism_psychoanalysis.pdf

I've been to this site before. My distaste for sectarian Trotskyism (is there another kind?) notwithstanding, I usually get one or two useful bits out of these internecine debates. Somewhere in his essay Brenner criticizes Novack's 1973 book Humanism and Socialism. Brenner manages to pinpoint weak points in Novack's argument, for example, on the question of human nature. Novack's book is similar to the two 1959 articles cited in my earlier post, albeit an expansion of the same themes. Little changed in 15 years for Novack, it seems.

There are certain things I like about some of Novack's philosophical books, most of which, I think, were published in the '70s, but unlike Novack, I changed quite a bit over any 15-year period you can name, and his abstract schematism and Trotskyist dogmatism are more striking and harder for me to take now.

There is also the fact that in the 1970s some Marxist intellectuals could still get away with the conception of lawlike social causality and the virtually inevitable future prospects of socialism despite the wrenching historical detours of the 20th century. The circumstances of today would necessitate a rewriting of arguments like these, except I suppose among still-resolute sectarians.

My critique of Novack stands, but I may have more to add when I've (re-)read his book. Given my own experiences with the secular humanist movement, I'd certainly write a badly needed critique differently.

Presumably one of Novack's concerns, and certainly one of mine, is how to orient oneself with respect to the organized humanist movement, which was in fact organizing itself at the same time Novack latched on to Marxism. What really is bourgeois or proletarian humanism? In organized movements, involving Marxists for instance, "humanism" was a banner of both Stalinists and anti-Stalinists. Proletarian humanists also latched onto the bourgeois humanist movement. (Mark Starr, who started out as a leftist and war resister in Wales and ended up as a labor bureaucrat in the USA is a prime example. He wrote an article in the late '40s about John Dewey and signed the Second Humanist Manifesto.) I don't find this taxonomy terribly useful to clarify the relationship between humanism and socialism.

The first Humanist Manifesto was issued in 1933, an historical turning point for obvious reasons. Many of the contributors to this project were Unitarians who decided it was time to shed the previous theistic trappings of their denomination. The principle author was the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, originator of a non-reductive materialist philosophy variously named critical realism, critical naturalism, emergent realism, and maybe something else I'm forgetting. Sellars was also a man with socialist leanings, though with no worked-out social theory that I'm aware of. Novack doesn't mention him, but of course he mentions others who signed on or got involved, such as Dewey and Corliss Lamont, whom Novack characterizes as liberal reformers who prefer to speak in abstractions about common ethical principles and human welfare in general, occluding the fundamental social facts and explanation of class antagonism. Apparently, Novack never updated himself from the 1930s, as far as the American movement was concerned (he did discuss dissident East European Marxist humanism), so of course he never analyzed what became of secular humanism as a result of McCarthyism and the Cold War. Hence we are stuck with these generalities and a few hoary examples. Arguing for a generic Marxist perspective, and one so flimsy that it cannot be used in practical or ideological interventions in the real world, does not much inspire me. Furthermore, the goal of influencing the way people think should not be from the perspective of getting them on board the correct vanguard party, but influencing their orientation in the practical situations in which they find themselves, which is all the harder to do as practical options become closed off.

Novack also proved to be behind the times in addressing the live debates of the '70s, most notably around sociobiology (unless he wrote of this elsewhere), where there is really something to fight about and which remains a live ideological problem.

The progressive intelligentsia has moved on, as a result of what wasn't killed off in the '70s. Today's sophisticated intellectuals, while paying lip service to class when necessary, have learned to identify their targets as racism, sexism, heterosexism, et al, and the intersections of these factors, and, whether incorporating or rejecting the conceptual edifice of postmodernism, generally succumb to the confused fragmentation of our time. Furthermore, the integration of perspectives, not just the obvious class perspective, but the incorporation of scientific knowledge, the processing of all the social and ideological currents with which we are bombarded--this whole scenario has outgrown the parameters of the arguments of old. To sum up, a static and schematic characterization of the relation between socialism and humanism and a formulaic advocacy for a Marxist perspective of the sort that Novack engaged in are useless.

The most interesting development in the U.S. atheist/humanist movement in the past year is the almost overnight explosion of a visible black atheist presence. The variety of ideological perspectives brought to this grouping in formation--encompassing not only the prevalent mainstream "liberalism" but the entire range from socialism to right-wing libertarianism, with occasional dollops of conservatism and Afrocentrism--provides us a veritable laboratory of bourgeois ideology in the remaking. (We shall see whether the initial thrill of overcoming isolation and ostracism and finding others with a common experience dissipates once the participants in this development have absorbed what black atheists do and do not have in common.) It is also instructive to view the degree of acceptance of the intellectual influences coming from the atheist/humanist movement as a whole and possible rebellions against the prevailing intellectual constellation. From those few voices inclined to challenge the star system and prevailing preoccupations of the atheist/humanist/skeptics movement, beyond the predictable call for diversity, what will we find? The one serious challenge I've seen is predicated on a black feminism and the notion of "white supremacy" as the fundamental social organizing principle, which indicts the existing atheist/humanist movement as dominated by white males--a predictably insipid criticism, which, among other things, conveniently omits an explanation of why this crop of white males (and why not add white females to the mix?) thinks and acts as it does, or how these people got to hold the positions they do, as opposed to those who never became leaders or media stars, or for that matter, how today's bigwigs may differ in orientation from the left-leaning white males of an earlier era whose influence was eclipsed by McCarthyism.