Re: [Marxism] Theocracy

[Haines Brown <brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> HB: Religion has little to offer beyond a moral critique of the
> status quo. I'm not so jaundiced as to deny that such a critique
> cannot upon occasion lead to positive action, such as in your
> example, but I wouldn't attribute to religion much more than a
> critique of the existing order and perhaps some values that might
> give direction to change.
> 
> i would disagree with this on historical materialist grounds. Let us
> take the example of the social gospel. An idea from Rauschenbusch
> and Sheldon leads directly to the formation of the Highlander school
> by Miles Horton. (Idea becomes institutionalized). The Highlander
> School has a direct organizational influence on the civil rights
> movement, and MLK not only attends the school, but is also heavily
> influenced by the ideas of Rauschenbusch. The rest, as they say, is
> history. So more than just a personalistic, individualist appeal to
> moral sensibility, religion has had a direct institutional and
> materialist impact in terms of moving people to take action on a
> collective level.

The difference here is that I'm taking a radically different approach
to things, and this difference has manifested itself in terms of a
particular issue. On this superficial level, I'd probably agree with
your suggestion that ideas could become institutionalized and so end
up changing the world. So I'd be willing to concede the point at this
level, but I am troubled by the issue at a more fundamental level.

I'll not elaborate this fundamental issue beyond a few hints. The
motive for my view goes back decades to a concern I had for the role
that ideas play in history, my feeling that to represent history as
simply the effect of ideas (which historians often do, and is perhaps
exemplified by the social Gospel example), ultimately gets us into hot
water.

I have three problems with it at this deeper level: it seemed a subtle
kind of idealism; it struck me as reductionist; and it seems tied to
what used to be called the Great Man Theory of History, which really
means a ruling class perspective. I will here address only the first
two criticisms and not justify the third, which would divert the
thread too much.

I'm not accusing Greg of any of these vices, and only suggesting that
a rather conventional mode of explanation that consists of
establishing a causal chain that leads from an idea to a material
outcome carries some unfortunate baggge. Not just because it seems
idealist (a reduction of ideas to mere epiphenomena would be just as
wrong), but because the causal chain itself is isolated from its
context to the exclusion of any structural causation, and this is
reductionist.

It seemed to me that a materialist would certainly have to allow for
the influence of ideas, but would reduce their role from that of the
mainspring of change to that of a mere constraint of an escape
wheel, from being an active causal force to becoming something
that gives focus to that force as a lens might focus a beam of light. 

Skipping here the gory details (scientific realism, thermodynamics,
process theory, probabilistic causality, etc.), I concluded that
constructive change really takes place because of physical struggle
that ultimately depends on dissipation (the production of heat and
sweat), and ideas merely constrain the probability distribution of the
possible outcomes of that struggle. That is, ideas don't drive
history, but instead only influence the likely outcomes of the
historical process. Although in origin the fruit of mental action,
they are not in themselves an active force, and are merely passive. We
can't conflate the active creation of ideas with their role in history
as if that creation can be identitified as the engine of history.

I hope all this helps explain why my position in this last exchange
seems rather ambivalent. Yes, ideas are important, and yes they can
influence what happens, but not because they have any causal potency.

Now, stepping back from this overly long and arid aside, let me get
back to religion. I don't see religion as a force for either good or
ill, but as a way that people find to express their relation to
circumstance and to deal with that relation. Religion does not offer a
way to change things, but to reconcile oneself to the world. The real
issue is our relation to the world, and I don't believe we can explain
religion except by starting out with it in mind. For example, my sense
that today's apparent trend toward fundamentalism in religious life
throughout the world (or at least that is my ill-informed impression)
is an effect of capitalist globalization. To engage religious life
today, either constructively or critically, one must, I believe,
engage it in such terms rather than as an autonomous collection of
ideas or simply as a matter of personal Angst.
 
> IBTW, the most profound negative dialectician was Nagarjuna. He
> makes most western philosophers read like a comic book by
> comparison.)

Agreed. But why not apply Nagarjuna's negative dialectic to the world
of ideas or to religion itself? That is, ideas are not sui generis,
but conditioned in their formation by the material world and only gain
efficacy as such, in their connection with the material world.

I hope I have explained and perhaps justified a bit the quotation with
which I started this message.

Haines

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