12.06.11

Religion and the left

Posted in General at 2:57 pm by nemo

Yesterday’s post on the Virtual Chruch reposted (below, by the time I finish comment)
The original link is: http://darwiniana.com/2011/12/03/virtual-church-of-the-holy-brick-i-take-a-stab-at-founding-a-new-world-religion/

The traffic doubled to six thousand visitors, in part due to this post. why? So I am not sure what to do with such a somewhat junky piece. But its metaphor is of value: the virtual. This idea as a good laugh for two posts. Now is the time to either shelve/toss away the whole idea as a paper airplane, or else make it a dogma in the New (virtual) Church. The virtual and the spiritual are not unrelated. And once you set something in motion, as a cult, a movement, or a church, the momentum follows a worldly, not a spiritual, logic.
My general point is that the left must carry the burden of the post-Reformation, and that is a undecipherable riddle.
I think perhaps the OWS and many other groups are in an undecidable situation with respect to the question of religion. People have been boxed into a corner by scientism, darwinism, and the new atheism, on the one hand, and the confusions of buddhism, islam, and xtianity as traditions, but not modernities, on the other. My point was that the Reformation was in fact a modernity, the first trigger of the whole modern system, in parallel with the scientific revolution. And the riddle of that re-formation remains. You may not know that some of the ideas of Luther ended up resurfacing in the atheist Schopenhauer, a token of the disguises and deeper side in much in that earlier thinker. Then again, the Reformation came with the German Social Revolution, with Thomas Munzer, and the mainstream Lutherans were not kind to that rebel. They were the new establishment, in a situation reminiscent of the bourgeois character of the French and other revolutions. The second coming of this situation came in the generation of the 1840′s and Marx/Engels were well aware of this, Engels actually writing a a book on this subject. The generation of Marx/Engels was a classic cultural cusp and the whole sequence of thought is the object of endless treatises, such is its classic nature: viz. Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx, on the rapid emergence, beside leftist/communist ideologies, of an atheist humanism in that era of the post-Hegelian coming of positivism. But after all the fireworks the result was somehow stillborn because it miscalculated the onet of scientism, in turned strangely sabotaged by the rightist anti-modernism of Nietzsche. The Marxists made of strange fetish out of the Hegelian dialectic in a kind of vestigial worship of an archaeological artifact. But the dialectic is/was a very insecure basis for spirituality or reversed Marxist analysis. It was after all cribbed notes from an occult tradition of the magical tringle, and made no real sense in Hegel’s version, however useful it is as a descriptive of the historical dynamics of philosophy. The solution to the problem of religious tradition was not there. So the left needs to reconsider the whole history. It is not a question of accomodationism, but in a concrete political context a movement like the OWS needs to be open to Xtian, Islamic, and ‘Buddhist’ resonance. The Xtian hypocrisy of Machiavellian politicians assuring the TV crowd of their ‘faith’ is so nauseating that I am mindful of that classic moment in the movie Animal House when the headmaster says, “Out with it”. It would nice if some non-hypocrites, Xtian or otherwise, could enter the political field.
It is important to consider the forms of the Reformation, and then to consider, pace the eonic effect, the way in which the Enlightenment, and especially the German Enlightenment, concluded that Reformation with a new perspective. Why do you think the old left was so fixated on the generation of Hegel and its aftermath. It was the hypnotic afterglow of the Reformation echoing through the era of revolution. Atheism was only an aspect of that. The larger dimension of philosophy left by that conclusion still remains something more than scientism that claimed to have superceded philosophy.

In the context of the OWS the rigidities of the new atheism suddenly seem an ill-fitting costume: the American public won’t fit into this straight-jacket, and any political movement that wishes to speak to that public needs a new language, that speaks to their past in their language, with a new strain entering that speaks to their future. A broader field of ideas is needed. A new left has to recover the ground that Sidney Hook so deftly recounted. And then move beyond that to the whole question of modernity, the modern transition, the religious ‘re-formations’, revolutions, ‘englightenments’ (they were several) to forestall the false crystallization that occurred in the generation of Marx/Engels as fellow travellers in the closing of the Iron Cage of Weber. And I must recommend a hybridization with the issues of Sufism and Buddhism (with Chinese Axial Age thematics quite possibly relevant): those entities require their own encounter with the

Meanwhile the Marxist studies of ideology remain as fundamental, perhaps better taken out of the context of all this other stuff. The issue of economic theory, and the way it has mesmerized the most intelligent into digging their own graves via a Faustian bargain with mathematical finesse (as with the hedge fund math talismans) demands a supersmart common sense, the kind pioneered by Marx’s critiques of ideology. Economic ideology.

The history of religion remains the hard study, because it resists scientific reduction, as the phenomenon of the Axial Age makes clear. My point about the ‘virtual church’ was that ultimately the Axial Age religions are bound in a cycle of manifestation and are on the way to disappearing, as a new logic of religion comes into being. The evidence shows that the left must carry that burdern, but, given the history so far, it seems incapable of that task. The task remains to be accomplished.

Comment on Virtual Church

You miss my point: what is ugly, actually, is the egoic founding of a religious movement without the proper insight into beginnings. Ron Hubbard was very ugly in that respect.
The results are visible in many contemporary cults. The ‘founders’ during the Axial Age, or the Reformation were part of an irrestible historical momentum, anyone outside those moments should be wary of not creating an abortive mess. That tends to make religious traditions seem more sacrosanct that they are. If we examine later Xtianity we see many of the problems, and ugliness, of cults, rather than religions. But all in all Xtianity fulfilled a good part of its promise. Still, we see the suspicious ‘second attempt’ to try again with Islam. The hopeless confusion of Jews and Xians was clearly an unforeseen catastrophe of religious beginnings: that’s what you get when you rush to add water to mortar to lay the holy brick.
We don’t see the hidden gnostic creators of these religions, and these (the tale of the three magi actually senses the presence of these hidden operators) figures were never held to any responsibility.

My point then is that we can outflank this issue with a new mode of ‘religious foundations’. The idea ofa virtual church of the holy brick, outlandish, and a toss-off, strikes me as actually right, in a funny way.

You can see the problem in today’s post on Chris Hedges: he is at risk, perhaps, of trying to constrict OWS around a christian tenor. Or maybe not, but my proposal for a virtual church with quaker style circles is post-christian, simply a question about the last phase of the Reformation.
And buddhists should be considering the issue of the Reformation, because without a consideration of modernity it cannot survive except as a retrograde movement.

In any case my Virtual Church was not a plea for a Christian presence in the OWS (as any reader of this blog will understand). At the same time it is an idea for an open assembly that must welcome religionists to the left, after the failure of the atheist humanism of the left since the time of Feuerbach.

I think the ‘virtual church of the holy brick’ should be massive a study group, and ‘boot camp’ for religious consideration, prior to religious comittment. Such an assembly could prosper better at a virtual stage, in a discipline of meditation, historical study and research into religion, examination of secularism and the potential for a spiritual psychology for modern man (a tough assignment).

We should also consider the larger framework of gnostic esotericism whose hidden logic is dangerous and toxic medicine to any religious public: witness the realm of the esoteric Xtianity of a Gurdjieff with its dark and and shadowy reactionary occultism, frightening, and Xtians as they exit their religious sanctuary in secularism are at risk, more even than atheist humanists, of demonic possession, and occult chaotification. I think the left needs to remain an ‘open clinic’ of religious hysterics (the term ‘ashram’ means clinic) with a robust agnosticism, sparing us any more lunatic collisions over the futile theism/atheism dialectic.
A lot of this work has already been done, and if we examine Kant, Hegel, et al. we see the last phase of the Reformation reach philosophy. But a quaker-like movement for a Xtian left might dovetail with a larger framework in such movements as the OWS which in a global phase needs to consider stances beyond religious dogmas, without the narrow fundamentalism of cults like that of the new atheists, or the stance on religion of the older ‘lefts’. Those groups, however, were aware of the dangers of compromise. Christians will tend to trojan horse conservative strains into any movement, behind a few progressives. The wisdom of the old left here should not be forgotten, but their equally flawed ‘atheism humanism’ isn’t really much of an answer either.

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