06.27.11

The secular enigma

Posted in General at 11:31 am by nemo

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/06/world-secular-means-god

Attempts to define secularism are mostly misguided. The secular is not a philosophy, but a cluster of issues centered on the early modern. The atheism of Nietzsche isn’t any more secular than Protestantism, the later, to be sure, already an archaic phase (as the Reformation) of the early modern.
The best way to consider the issue is to see ‘secularism’ as the phase of the new age of modernity relative to the eonic effect and its series. The issues are those of establishing a transformation beyond the Axial Age foundations, that, and much else. It is an aspect of historical/evolutionary dynamism, with a cluster of effects.
The postmodern, although Eagleton won’t give up here easily, is simply a phantom red herring that has confused the issue, as has Nietzsche, whose obsessions are no more solid that what he attacks.

Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.

If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus. Secular thinking, too, had to be demythified. “God had in fact gone into hiding,” Robbins observes, “and now had to be smoked out of various secular terms, from morals and nature and history to man and even grammar.” Even Nietzsche’s will to power has a suspiciously metaphysical ring to it.

Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place, and so mourning its disappearance would be like lamenting that a rabbit can’t recite Paradise Lost.

Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age – if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.

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