This paper develops an alternative to Marx's theory of religion from within the dialectical tradition. Drawing on recent developments in the physical, biological and social sciences, and on his own arguments regrounding cosmic teleology and epistemological realism, the author argues that a complete and consistent dialectical sociology must take into account not only the material conditions for and structural constraints on human development, but also the underlying teleological ordering of human beings, something which is already implicit in labor and other forms of practical activity and which becomes explicit in religious consciousness. While religious ideas, like all other ideas are condition by the social structures under which they are produced, and while they can certainly be mobilized to legitimate oppressive social structures, atheism, because it negates the ordering of human civilization and indeed of the universe to a higher end, is a far more dangerous obstacle to human development. By leaving the drive towards the development of ever higher forms of organization ungrounded, it disarms the working classes and reduces socialism to the expression of the interests of a particular interest group. The author argues that atheism has formed a constitutive dimension of the ideological strategy of the bourgeoisie and the principal means by which it has contained the international workers movement over the course of the past 150 years.
The atheist utopia has collapsed. The "death of God" has very nearly turned out to be the death of humanity. Since the middle of the last century, religion has been called everything from an alienation of human potential to an infantile neurosis. It has been accused of sapping our will to power and serving as an instrument of domination. And yet the past thirty years have shown nothing if not that religion continues to be a potent force for progress as human beings, often under the conditions of the worst oppression, struggle to make sense out of the universe and their place therein, and to create the conditions necessary for them to realize their vocation as authentic participants in the cosmohistorical evolutionary process.
Still, the vocal critics of secularization, from Qum to Communio, from Lhasa to Liberty University, have hardly proven themselves to be friends of human development and social progress. On the contrary leaders from the most diverse religious traditions have, when it really counted, cast their lot with Capital and defined the boundaries of their traditions in a way which effectively identifies piety with patriarchy and spirituality with submission.
In the face of this complex situation, there has been a growing effort, especially among sociologists close to the religious left, to develop a new sociology of religion which is able to theorize both the powerful role of religion in catalyzing struggles for social justice, and the enduring presence of certain religious elites among the strategic reserves of reaction. Otto Maduro (Maduro 1980) has developed a complex analysis of the diverse ways in which religion can affect and be affected by the class struggle. Francois Houtart (Houtart 1992) has gone further, acknowledging the role of religion in representing humanity's place in the universe as a whole, a role which endures even when contradictions between humanity and nature, and between the forces and relations of production have been resolved in practice and no longer require symbolic resolution in a religious utopia. Both Maduro and Houtart, however, seem to conclude from the diverse roles that religion plays in the class struggle that religion itself is essentially a politically neutral phenomenon, capable of being mobilized by either progressive or reactionary forces. I have wanted to argue a stronger thesis (Mansueto 1988), one which has understandably been unpopular on the left, which retains much of its secularist and anticlerical heritage and which has nonetheless won me few friends in the religious hierarchies. While religion can and often is mobilized to legitimate social structures which hold back human development, and in the process itself becomes profoundly distorted, the religious impulse itself is not only compatible with, but in fact essential to human development and social progress. Conversely atheism, while it may play a progressive role under certain limited social conditions where the criticism of reactionary religious formations is a precondition for social progress, represents by its very nature a denial of transcendental principles of value in terms of which alone progress can be defined and of the teleological cosmology in terms of which alone social progress can be shown to play an ultimately meaningful role in the larger cosmohistorical evolutionary process.
My first attempt to argue this thesis (Mansueto 1988) was, frankly, more Durkheimian than dialectical and focused on the irreducible individualism of all atheistic doctrine. To the extent that we regard religion as a "collective representation" of society and society as a reality sui generis (Durkheim 1911/1965), atheism represents a negation of that social body, something which makes the whole socialist project meaningless. To this fundamentally Durkheimian account of religion I joined a Gramscian analysis of the complex ways in which religious solidarities, themselves fundamentally progressive, could be mobilized by various classes and class fractions in service to diverse social projects --some progressive, and some not. While I continue to affirm the power of this early insight, it is clearly insufficient as a comprehensive account of the nature and political valence of religion, and could be used to legitimate a cult of "revolutionary self-sacrifice" using, for example, the Christian symbolism surrounding martyrdom and crucifixion --something which has nothing to do with authentic human development or social progress. At the same time, my theory provided little basis for understanding how atheism could ever even have seemed to play a progressive role, or for distinguishing between progressive and reactionary forms of either religious doctrine. I have wanted for sometime, therefore, to expand and restate my theory of religion in a way which addresses these problems and which reflects the more sophisticated scientific and philosophical position which I have developed in the past ten years. Clearly any brief statement such as this must necessarily be somewhat schematic, outlining rather than establishing my argument and setting the terms for continuing discussion.
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Religion is a social reality and any theory of religion is also, implicitly, a theory of human society. Part of the difficulty faced by sociologists of religion sympathetic to dialectical and historical materialism has been a reluctance to depart from the fundamental account of human society outlined by Marx and Engels, especially at a time when this account has been the object of entirely unjustified attacks. It is, however, an inescapable fact that a radical revaluation of the role of religion in social life involves a fundamental change in our understanding of social life itself --a change which, furthermore, reflects even more profound changes at the level of cosmology and metaphysics.
In order to establish this it is worth spending a few moments looking at the role of the critique of religion in historical materialism and its relationship to the larger atheism of the dialectical materialist system as whole. Marx's critique of religion, which for all its fame really amounts to little more than a few fragments, amounts to this:
1) From Feuerbach Marx takes over the idea that religious ideas are a projection or alienation of humanity's highest capacities: knowledge, love, creativity and power, and that in ascribing these qualities to God we implicitly or explicitly deny them in ourselves, rendering ourselves ignorant egoists incapable of acting or creating (Feuerbach 1841/1957).
2) Marx complains that Feuerbach fails to explain why or how this alienation takes place, and suggests that it is a result of a deeper alienation generated at the economic level (Marx 1845/1978). In Marx's early writings this alienation is understood as consisting in the wage relation, by which the worker is alienated from the product of his labor and thus from nature, from other human beings, and from his own essence or "species being (Marx 1844/1978)." In Capital Marx clarifies this analysis, pointing to the alienating character of "generalized commodity production" or the market system, which constitutes a power independent of humanity (individual or collective) which disposes of our capacities in accord with alien laws which remain largely opaque and mysterious. It is only by transcending the market system that religious alienation itself can be overcome (Marx 1867/1977).
We will argue later, after we have outlined our general theory, that this is in fact a fairly accurate analysis of a certain type of religion --i.e. the Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism of nineteenth century Germany, and to a lesser extent of religion generally to the extent that it has actually been shaped by the market system. Whatever Marx's intent, it is neither a general theory nor a global critique of religion, and in itself neither presupposes nor implies atheism.
To find the theoretical foundations of dialectical materialist atheism we must, rather, look to Engels' important work on the Dialectics of Nature (Engels 1880/1940), and specifically to the introductory sections of this work. What Engels clearly had hoped to be able to show was that the dynamic of social-historical progress (development of the productive forces) which he and Marx had identified, and which provided the criterion by which they judged the relative merits of various economic structures, was in fact part of a larger dynamic of cosmohistorical progress, the upward surge of matter from less complex to more complex forms of organization. This in turn would have provided at least something of an ethical foundation for socialism --an answer to the question "Why should we be so concerned about developing the productive forces anyway?" Anyone who reads the opening sections of the Dialectics cannot help but be impressed by the depth and tragedy of Engels' failure. Middle and late nineteenth century physics, obsessed as it was with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the imminent "heat death" or "entropic disintegration" of the universe, did not support Engels' hope for a vision of cosmohistorical progress. The best that Engels can manage is a "desperate hope" that even as life and intelligence are defeated at one point in the universe, they reassert themselves elsewhere in an endless cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth which is reminiscent of Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return. Engels was unable or unwilling to break with bourgeois science and its pessimistic cosmology and to mount an argument for cosmic teleology. And universes which end in heat death or entropic disintegration have no room for God.
This larger atheistic cosmology and metaphysics, while not implicit in or implied by Marx's critique of religion is already implicit in the basic principles of historical materialism as laid out by Marx in his "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx 1859/1966)," and as later systematized by Engels in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Engels 1880/1978)." According to this view the development of human society can be explained largely in terms of the complex interaction of the "forces" and "relations" of production. Working under given material (i.e. ecological) conditions human beings develop increasingly sophisticated technologies which amplify their productive capacity. These developing forces of production imply definite ways of organizing the production process and of centralizing and allocating resources for production --what Marx calls productive relations. And the forces and relations of production in turn imply various legal and political structures, and certain definite forms of social consciousness. At certain points in development the relations of production, the way of centralizing and allocating resources, become an obstacle to further technological development, setting in motion economic crisis, class struggle, and revolution.
This is a powerful account of human society and one which can hold its own easily against the various alternatives presented by bourgeois sociology: e.g. Hayek (Hayek 1978), Weber (Weber 1921/1968), etc. But it does have one very serious scientific flaw, a flaw which is connected with its underlying atheism. I am not referring to the claim that our ideas are shaped by social practice, a notion which is in fact fully coherent with the Thomistic concept of "connatural knowledge," and which need not imply either a relativism or a reductionism (Mansueto forthcoming). Rather, I am speaking of a very inadequate analysis of the act of production itself.
In his early works Marx shows a clear recognition of the centrality of labor in human nature. Indeed, this is Marx's fundamental contribution to philosophical anthropology: a recognition that at least one way to understand the distinctiveness of human nature is in our ability to add to the complexity of the organization of the universe, in a way which merely biological systems, which are confined to the reproductive of their structures, do not (Marx 1846/1978). But the analysis of the act of production remains rudimentary, and in the "Contribution" it almost seems as if Marx has reverted to a sort of socialist Darwinism --that in the struggle to survive, to produce our means of subsistence we develop increasingly sophisticated technologies, which in turn imply more complex forms of social organization and more complex ideologies. But the origin of these technologies themselves remains unexplained. What is missing here is a recognition that the act of production is itself already an intellectual act. It involves both an understanding of the latent potential of the raw material, whether this is physical, biological, or social in nature, and some aim or purpose. Already in the productive act itself we are compelled to think teleologically --to reflect on possibilities and purposes. And if our most immediate aims are the conservation and reproduction of our animal capacities, we soon discover more complex goods which we attempt to realize through production. It is only a matter of time before we arrive at the idea at least of God: of a knowledge and love, and creativity and power which is infinite, perfect, and necessary.
Historical materialist sociology is atheistic because it neglects this teleological ordering in the production process, this constant search for ever higher goods which terminates always and only in God. Or rather, historical materialist sociology is atheistic because dialectical materialist cosmology is atheistic, because it rejects the notion that evolution terminates in God, and thus regards the pursuit of God by whatever means as a vain hope and a useless aspiration, as at best a distraction from rather than an inspiration for the human civilizational project. Human labor and social progress represent an ultimately losing struggle against the forces of cosmic chaos. This is the real reason why Marx takes his insightful criticism of the social basis and political valence of some religions to be a critique of religion in general.
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It follows from what has been said that a revaluation of religion at the sociological level makes sense only if we believe there are grounds to reverse Engels' verdict on cosmic teleology and thus on the reality of God. These are questions which I have addressed elsewhere (Mansueto 1995, forthcoming), and which form the principal topic of a multivolume work in progress. I must ask the reader to set them aside for now and assume with me that we do in fact have good reason to believe that the universe is ultimately meaningful, and that human creativity is a participation in a larger cosmohistorical process which, far from being overwhelmed by some opposing force of entropy and disintegration, in fact terminates in God --beliefs presumably shared by Catholic sociologists such as Maduro and Houtart, and the progressive Catholic constituencies for which they write. If this is true, what difference does it make for sociology generally, and for the sociology of religion in particular? How does it affect our appraisal of the role of religion and atheism in human development and social progress?
Our analysis points first of all to a limited but very significant modification in historical materialist doctrine. Where historical materialism conceives human society in terms of an interaction between material conditions and structural constraints (forces and relations of production, political and ideological superstructure) we add a third factor: teleological attraction. In other words, human society represents an integral part of a cosmohistorical evolutionary process, a development of matter from lesser to higher degrees of organization, from potency to act, under the attractive power of God in terms of which alone this process can be adequately explained. Just how this development takes place, however, depends on the material conditions under which it is taking place and the nature of existing structures which channel development along certain definite pathways, encouraging some activities and discouraging or even precluding others. By the "material conditions" for social development we mean the ecological context in which that development takes place, which already make possible certain pathways of development and preclude others. By structural constraints we mean the whole ensemble of more or less established social patterns, including technology, economic structure, political structure, ideological problematics, etc. which largely determine how resources are used, to what sorts of activities they are allocated, who makes key strategic decisions and how, what sorts of questions may be asked and what sorts of answers are considered reasonable and respectable, etc. In so far as all activities require certain material resources, the economic structure (which may or may not be really distinct from the political structure, depending on the social formation) will, in the final analysis, determine what can and cannot happen within a given society, regardless of human aspirations to the contrary. And, for reasons we will examine shortly, the economic structure will also play a powerful role in determining that to which people actually aspire. Where our theory differs from historical materialism is simply in the fact that we recognize the presence of a teleological attractor (God) which acts on human beings and human societies as on all forms of matter as final cause, inspiring development by Her incredible Beauty, Truth, Goodness and Integrity. The human intellect is structured in a way which, limited by the structural constraints imposed by a given social order, we can become conscious of this end and aspire to it in a way which catalyzes growth and development.
Religion is humanity's drive towards the telos as it becomes conscious of itself and understands itself under definite material conditions and limited by the structural constraints of a given social formation, to the extent to which these structural constraints have not caused it to forget itself and lose sight of its ultimate meaningfulness and teleological dynamism. Atheism is just precisely this forgetting, a forgetting which, we shall see, is the product of very specific social conditions which prevent us from seeing the telos and realizing the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe.
This in turn affects our understanding of the dynamics of class struggle and the role of religion therein. Progress is always led by new insights into the latent potential of the universe and the end to which it is ordered. And these insights invariably come from those who are actually engaged in creative activity, the working classes broadly understood, as opposed to those who merely consume surplus which they have extracted from others. When social structures become an obstacle to realization of the new possibilities discovered by the working classes, there is a tendency at least to try to reorganize society so that these new potentials can be realized. The result is class struggle. And at the highest levels of class struggle, as Gramsci (Gramsci 1949) pointed out, ideological and especially religious questions play a critical role, as classes vie for intellectual and moral leadership.
It should already be apparent why we believe religion to be fundamentally a progressive phenomenon, and atheism an obstacle to human progress. It is our vision of the telos which draws us on towards the realization of our latent potential, and which catalyzes creativity in the economic, political, and ideological spheres. Atheism is fundamentally a denial of the ultimate meaningfulness of our actions and there is no greater obstacle to growth and progress than nihilism and despair. But it is also quite possible that an exploitative class, which is itself unproductive an nihilistic may need to have recourse to a religious discourse in order to establish hegemony over, for example, peasant communities which conserve a strong sense of connectedness to the cosmic order. The result is a deformation of the religious forms of the peasantry in a way which serves the social project of the exploiters. Conversely, where an exploiting class has exercised hegemony through the mechanism of a deformed religious ideology, atheism may seem liberating in the short run. But if we look closely we will see that it is always an ideological Trojan Horse, which makes the social project of a rising class of exploiters (the bourgeoisie) seem progressive, while ideologically disarming the working classes.
In order to see just how this all works we need to look a bit more closely at the nature of the human intellect and the ways in which its ordering to the Truth is at once facilitated and constrained by the structure of human society.
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Human creativity and thus our ability to add something to the level of organization of the universe is grounded in our intellectual capacities. Where other animals, relying exclusively on the senses and on sensory cognition, are able to know and pursue only particular goods, we have the ability to abstract from the data of the senses the intelligible nature of things: to classify them, to map out their structure, and even to infer their ultimate purposes. This in turn makes it possible to imagine new forms of organization which serve existing purposes more effectively or even to infer new and higher purposes of which we were not previously aware. If we are to understand religion, therefore, we must begin with an understanding of knowledge.
The problem of knowledge is without question the most difficult and controverted in contemporary philosophy. Indeed, the history of philosophy since Descartes might easily be regarded as little more than the history of a growing skepticism about our ability to know anything, at least anything outside our own minds, together with a series of efforts, running as a sort of counterpoint to this dominant theme, directed at overcoming this skepticism and thus regrounding science, ethics --and religion. It is hardly possible here to rehearse this history, much less to respond in depth to each of the succeeding forms of skepticism which have captured the imaginations of the intelligentsia of Europe and North America. What we can and must do, however, if we are to address the religious question, is to at least sketch out an alterative to this skepticism, and show how realism in epistemology is in fact quite compatible with the social determination of knowledge.
What we are proposing is, in fact, a revision of the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge (Aristotle De Anima III, Aquinas Summa Theologiae I Q 85-89; Maritain 1937). According to this view, knowledge begins with the external senses, which gather data from the environment. The internal senses then form these data into images which are illuminated by something called the "Agent Intellect," which abstracts something at least of the intelligible nature of the object, which is then received by the potential intellect. Thomas (Aquinas In Boethius De Trinitate Q 5) and the Dominican commentators (Cajetan, In De Ente et Essentia, Prooemium, Q 1, n 5., De Nominium Analogia 5; John of St. Thomas, Ars Logica II, Q 27, a 1; Maritain 1937, 1951; Simmons 1959; Pugh 1997) speak of various degrees of abstraction: the abstractio totalis which abstracts the logical whole from the parts and the abstractio formalis which abstracts the form of a thing from its matter. The abstractio formalis is further distinguished into the abstractio totius, which abstracts from individualizing matter to the essence of a thing, the abstractio formae which grasps the underlying structure of the object arriving at, for example, a mathematical formalism, and the separatio which separates the being of a thing from its essence and thus makes it possible to rise to knowledge of Being itself, to the transcendental principles of value, and thus to God.
What was always difficult for this theory was the nature of the Agent Intellect itself (von Steenberghen 1980). Aristotelian metaphysics required that since it knows immaterial principles, that it be an entirely immaterial form. But since forms of the same species are individuated by matter, this seemed to imply that there is only one Agent Intellect, a conclusion which, aside from the theological problems it raised, made it difficult to explain why different people have different ideas.
The development of the biological and social sciences has made it possible both to find new evidence to support the Thomistic theory and to resolve the problem of the Agent Intellect. Recent research in neurophysiology suggests that data from the external senses do in fact produce something like images in the brain --what some researchers are now calling "topographic representations." These topographical representations sometimes even resemble the objects sensed, at least in the case of visual data. Topographical representations can be stored in compressed form as "dispositional representations" which also store data regarding the larger state of the body at the time of the initial perception --something which highlights the link between cognition and appetite. The complex structure of the human nervous system (not just the brain) makes it possible, furthermore, to link images in extraordinarily intricate ways (Damasio 1995). It is these complex mappings between images which, at the neurological level, constitute thought and which Aristotle and Thomas called the potential intellect.
This sort of neurophysiology theory does a good job of explaining the biological basis for intellectual knowledge; it does not really explain why we have the ideas that we do, much less why the same people, confronted with similar data, often develop radically different ideas. In order to address this question we need to return to the debate around the Agent Intellect. Here a suggestion by Dante forms a useful starting point. Dante, who had been influenced by the Latin Averroists but rejected the idea of the unity of the intellect, stressed that it took humanity as a whole, collectively, to realize the full potential of the human intellect. Partly this was a question of participation in the struggle for justice (an issue to which we shall return). But it was also a matter of securing the resources to build institutions which could cultivate the intellect --universities, the church in its exercise of the magisterium, etc. (Gilson 1968:167)
The sociology of knowledge has picked up where Dante left off, suggesting a solution to this problem which so vexed medieval philosophy. It has become clear from the study of human cognition that, whatever the role of biological factors, the development of the intellect depends on, even as it contributes to, the emergence of ever more complex forms of social organization. Already at the beginning of this century Durkheim (Durkheim 1911/1965) had demonstrated that the structure of human communities provides a kind of model for structuring human experience of the universe as a whole. Thus participation in a band provides the idea of whole and part, relationship, and a rudimentary idea of the connectedness of things. Participation in a tribe, with a complex kinship system, provides a basis for the development of more complex schemes of classification, and thus a rudimentary sense of structure. Later the Soviet philosopher Bogdanov (Bogdanov 1928/1980) pointed out the role of the village community, in which each individual has a definite function in the context of a complex division of labor directed towards a common end, for the emergence of the idea of organization, and of the universe as an organized, meaningful system. The Soviet neuropsychologist Luria, in the 1920s and 1930s, showed that certain more complex intellectual operations, especially higher abstraction, presuppose involvement in more complex social interactions (Luria 1974/1976).
In other words, human society is the Agent Intellect (at least for humanity), the faculty which enables us to abstract from sense-images the intelligible essence of things and thus to know what they are. We should note that this way of understanding the Agent Intellect provides an interesting solution to the problem of its unity or multiplicity. The social system is both one and many. It is "one" in the sense that it is ultimately a single interconnected system, prior to the individual, which informs his/her particular intellect from the outside. It is many both in its internal diversity and in the sense that it is internalized, and internalized differently by different individuals, so that however dependent we are on our social context for the basic forms of our thought, there is no group mind which is doing our thinking for us. But the development of higher degrees of abstraction depends in part at least on the development of more complex forms of social organization, and might be held back by deformations in the social structure.
At the level of the individual, the agent or social intellect acts through the mechanism of connaturality. According to Aristotle and Thomas "like knows like." Thomas relies on this idea both to explain the way in which we know certain virtues, and also to provide the foundation for his mystical theology. Thus, there is a wordless and preconceptual knowledge which the temperate person has of temperance or the justice person of justice. The person who practices the theological virtue of charity, similarly, has a direct preconceptual knowledge of God's own love, and thus of God Herself (Aquinas Summa Theologiae II-II Q 45). The idea of connaturality, however, has far wider implications. By participating in increasingly complex social structures we become connatural with those structures, living them as it were. Our assimilation of and to the structure in question then illuminates the images we garner from sense experience and makes possible successively higher degrees of abstraction.
It is even possible to theorize what has traditionally been called revelation in the terms of this theory. Revelation becomes a sort of "superabstraction," wherein the potential intellect (i.e. the human nervous system) receives truths abstracted from the data of the senses not by the social intellect in virtue of our participation in a definite social structure, but rather by a "supersocial" intellect which we have access to in virtue of our participation in the even more complex cosmohistorical structures in which human society and human history are embedded. This superabstraction might produce a concept which, however, is too complex to be susceptible of proof, in which case we would speak of intellectual prophecy, or it might catalyze the production of an image or series of images, in which case we would speak of imaginative prophecy.
Doesn't this solution, though, open the floodgates for relativism and undermine the possibility of any authentic knowledge of universals? If society is the Agent Intellect, aren't these universals merely social products, artifacts of the way particular societies organize themselves, useful, perhaps, for understanding the customs and mores of the societies in question but hardly a window on the organization of the universe, much less on God and the transcendental principles of value? There can be no doubt that human societies, like the sensory systems of various animal species, are finite and can reveal only part of the systems which they perceive. There is, furthermore, no doubt that the part of reality which is revealed by these structures is selected by the needs of the social systems in question, just as animals develop those senses which serve their adaptive strategies. But abstractions which help a society to survive and flourish must disclose something important about the way the universe really works, just as well adapted sensory systems disclose something important about an animal's environment. Ideas and systems of ideas which lead to stagnation and decline are probably flawed in some way. And this is all we really need in order to show that abstractions are not merely social products which have no relationship whatsoever with the organization of the universe, but rather products of an interaction between human beings and the world which discloses real if limited truths, truths which can be tested in practice and then serve as the basis for further development.
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What can this epistemology --which is also a fundamental sociology of knowledge-- tell us about the problem of religion? In order to answer this question we need first to determine to which of the various degrees of abstraction religious knowledge most pertains. And since we have assigned so much importance to human society as an organ of knowledge we will need to assess the impact of social structure on the development of each of these degrees of abstraction. For reasons which we explain in greater depth elsewhere, we reject the distinction added by the Baroque commentators between the abstractio totalis and the abstractio formalis and revert to Thomas' simpler system of three degrees of abstraction, which we call totalization, formalization and, for reasons which will become clear, transcendental abstraction.
Totalization is fundamentally a matter of classification. Thus we are able to abstract from a visual image of Fido the increasingly higher order taxa dog, carnivore, mammal, vertebrate, animal, living thing, etc. This is something which depends only on participation in social taxa: i.e. in definite social groups which are distinct from other groups and which are grouped together in nested hierarchies --something which sociologists since Durkheim have attested even among the simplest hunter-gatherer societies. Formalization, on the other hand, which begins by attempting to rationalize taxonomies and which ends by developing complex mathematical or structuralist formalisms appears only in societies which have a significant market sector and becomes the epistemological ideal only in societies characterized by generalized commodity production. Indeed, the earliest abstract mathematicians, Thales of Miletus and his disciple Pythagoras, were merchants and lived in the planet's first true petty commodity society: Ancient Greece. This is hardly surprising. A market society appears to the merchant, entrepreneur --and even more so to the rentier-- as a system of prices, i.e. quantities related by complex formalisms. Participation in this sort of society makes possible the abstraction of such formal structures, as well as their analytic manipulation. The gradual penetration of market relations into every sphere of society leads to the conviction that exchange is actually prior to and gives birth to production. Epistemologically this leads to the notion that it is the formalism which is really real. Thus in societies characterized by generalized commodity production mathematical physics is always the epistemological ideal.
Transcendental abstraction involves something else entirely. Here we are interested not simply in classifying objects in increasingly higher taxa or in describing their structures with increasing rigor. We want, rather to grasp the very principle of their existence. We want to know why they are and why they are the way they are. Applied to particular systems this leads us inevitably to an exploration of purpose. Certainly no authentic biological or social science is possible without recourse to teleological categories. And even mathematical physicists have increasingly run up against the inevitability of at least indirectly teleological reasoning with the discovery of cosmic "fine-tuning": the fixing of various physical constants in just the way necessary to make possible the development of life and intelligence (Barrow and Tipler 1986, Harris 1991, 1992). And as Plato and Aristotle and Thomas demonstrated long ago, this sort of reasoning terminates ultimately in the idea of God --not, to be sure, a Divine Sovereign who orders the universe from the outside, but rather in a principle so infinitely Beautiful, True, and Good, and Integrity so perfect, that it draws things out of the nothingness of pure possibility into being, and then draws them ever onward towards increasingly complex degrees of organization. To exist, from this point of view, is to be organized --to be ordered to an end. The power of Being itself is the power of teleological attraction. What the superabstraction of revelation does is to explore the Divine Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Integrity ever more fully, plunging into the depths of God. And so religion is primarily based on transcendental abstraction and superabstraction, and not on totalization or formalization.
What are the social conditions for transcendental abstraction? Here simple logic and historical evidence concur. In order to think purpose, to grasp telos, one must live it: i.e. one musk live in a society which is visibly ordered to an end. Humanity's most powerful experience of this was undoubtedly in the communitarian societies which emerged after the discovery of horticulture (7000 B.C.E.) and which lasted roughly 4000 years. These were among the most progressive societies in human history in technological terms (Childe 1951, Lenski 1982). They were also characterized by a profound spirituality and a profound conviction in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and of humanity's place therein, something which was generally articulated in the cult of the Great Mother, who is at once a goddess of fertility (the Hellenic Demeter, the Nahuatl Tonantzi) and a goddess of wisdom (the Keres Sussistinako, whose name means "Thinking Woman" because her thought brought all things into being, the Egyptian Au Set or Isis, cosmic librarian and storehouse of wisdom) (Waters 1963, Stone 1976, Mansueto 1995). Here growth and development are understood as the product at once of understanding and nurture. By grasping the organizing principle of things and caring for them tenderly, we release their latent potential and bring the cosmos to completion.
The advent of patriarchy and the warlord state around 3000 B.C.E. --of tributary social formations in which militarized elites extracted rents, taxes, or forced labor from dependent peasant communities-- did not entirely undermine this conviction in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe, but it did distort it rather profoundly. The end is no longer the cultivation of the earth and of human wisdom and love, but rather the enrichment of the warlord elite; the means is no longer penetration of the mysteries of nature and careful cultivation of latent potential, but rather warfare and taxis. The Great Mother thus gives way to Divine Sovereigns and their earthly exemplars, a process which is described in mythological cycles which chronicle the dismemberment of the Goddess by her patriarchal successor (Coatlicue and Huizilopochtli, Set and Tiamat) and which often re-present her as a devouring beast (Coatlicue, Kali) (Stone 1976). In tributary societies creativity is understood as violence and sacrifice. In some cases the exploitation becomes so intense that the sense of ultimate meaningfulness does collapse completely. Thus the conviction, among the Aztecs, that this was the last "sun" or era of the cosmos and that soon Tezcatlipoca, archaic god of the Milky Way, now known as Yaotl, enemy of both sides, responsible for causing war in order to guarantee the supply of sacrificial victims, will spring forth from the bowels of the earth armed with his tecpatl or sacrificial knife, and destroy humanity, the universe, and the gods leaving Nothing in his wake (Brundage 1985). We need hardly note either that these tributary societies were among the most stagnant in human history (Childe 1951, Lenski 1982, Lerner 1991), or that this sort of religion contributes to the dynamic of stagnation. We might do well, however, to call the reader's attention to the fact that the "gods" of these tributary societies are not anything like the God/dess. Where Au Set and Sussistinako articulate a profound conviction in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe, the gods of tributary societies are at best finite powers struggling against an underlying cosmic disorder and at worst --like Tezcatlipoca-- actually agents of cosmic destruction. In this sense, the religious vision of tributary societies actually tends towards atheism.
It is precisely in these tributary societies, however, that we see the emergence of a new sort of religion --a religion which is focused on salvation in the original etymological sense of the word, on making humanity and the universe whole (and thus holy) once again. Originally these salvation religions are of two kinds. The first is simply a reassertion of the religion of the communitarian formations which are subjected to the formal domination of the warlord state --of the cult of the Great Mother or some other cult by means of which the people reassert their confidence in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe, and reject the identification of creativity with violence and self-sacrifice. Thus the cult of Isis in the Mediterranean basin --Isis who recovers the scattered fragments of wisdom and thus makes the universe whole once again (Stone 1976). Thus the cult of the Nahuatl Tonantzi, who rejects human sacrifice in favor of the products of the people's labor. The second type reflects the imprint of the tributary order more profoundly. We see this type most clearly in the cult of YHWH. Here is warrior God if ever there was one --but a warrior on the side of the oppressed (Judges 5, Ps 82). Indeed, research over the past twenty five years has established fairly clearly that ancient Israel originates in a peasant revolt which attempts to restore a communitarian order in resistance to the warlords of Canaan and their Egyptian and Mesopotamian overlords (Gottwald 1979).
The salvation religions add something to the archaic insight into the telos. In communitarian societies it seemed obvious that the universe was purposeful and that human life had meaning as a real participation in the creative life of the cosmos. Because of this, it was not always clear just what was being claimed. The stagnation and social disintegration which accompanied the advent of the warlord state created a crisis and forced a decision. Is the world cosmos or chaos? Does creation take place through understanding and nurturing latent potential, or through the violence of warfare and sacrifice? Is there really a telos at all, or is the present darkness just the beginning of a long night without end? Is there some criterion by which the warlords can be judged and found wanting? These judgements, furthermore, are not merely theoretical but also practical: they imply a stand on behalf of truth and justice, a stand which often requires extraordinary courage and perseverance. Indeed, action on behalf of justice often precedes reflection on the ground of justice, so that the action itself becomes a means of knowledge.
This is the crux of our argument. It is in the just act that we become connatural with the principle of Being itself, and thus are able to know that principle. And the deeper and more profound our action on behalf of justice, the deeper and more profound our insight into Being. This is why the divine name, YHWH, which is the causative form of the verb "to Be" is revealed to Israel not at the term of a scientific investigation, but rather on the battlefields of the revolution, in the struggle against the Canaanite warlords and their Egyptian patrons. This is why the full face of the Goddess, who is not only nurturing Mother and wise Teacher, but also a demanding leader who requires of humanity the qualities of mature collaborators in the cosmohistorical process, appears only to those who are willing and able to do what this process requires --to find the meaning at the heart of the contradiction, to reweave the fabric of the cosmos from the thread of shattered dreams and to end with a tapestry richer and more Beautiful than any finite mind could imagine.
Most of the principal "world religions" --Judaism, Christianity, and Islam very clearly, but also with some modifications Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism-- are all the product of some combination of these two dynamics, coupled with a powerful reassertion of the dark power of the tributary state. This is especially clear in the case of Christianity. At its best Christianity brings together the Jewish focus on meeting God in the just act with the archaic struggle to recover the lost fragments of wisdom and to reweave the fabric of the universe which had its roots in the many religions of the Goddess which have become joined to Christianity in the form of Marian devotion as it has spread around the planet. At its worst Christianity becomes a cult of the crucified God which resembles nothing so much as the death cults of the tributary states. Hinduism and Buddhism show a different kind of ambiguity, integrating a powerful grasp of the underlying unity of all things with a radical otherworldliness born, no doubt, of despair at the possibility of breaking the strangle hold of the warlords.
***
It should be noted that the transcendental abstraction and superabstraction practiced by all these societies is, thus far, largely without benefit of formalization. These higher degrees of abstraction, necessary to authentic knowledge of God, do not presuppose the acquisition of the capacity for formalization, analysis, and critique. These latter capacities, as we have noted, emerge only with the market system, and become joined to transcendental abstraction only in the struggle to resolve the new contradictions this system creates. Thus the planet's first petty commodity society produces not only a new focus on mathematical formalism; it also produces a new pessimism regarding the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and regarding the existence of transcendental principles of meaning and value. This is because in market society there is no global purpose, no common end, to which all activities are directed --even the deformed telos of military conquest and exploitation. People experience society as a system of externally related individuals, social "atoms" bouncing off each other as they go their separate ways, or else as a system of (quantities) prices. Neither sort of system has any ultimate end or purpose. Thus the two organic ideologies of the marketplace: empiricist atomism and rationalist formalism. Teleology is either excluded or reduced to the level of the individual.
In ancient Greece (Anderson 1974) this petty market system was combined with a political system, product of partially successful peasant revolts, which accorded political rights to male property owners, even small peasants, while conserving significant class contradictions. In order to be certain that their views prevailed in the assembly the ruling classes --large landowners producing oil and wine for the market-- required the service of trained rhetors who could persuade the people to vote against their own interests --who could make the worse appear the better cause. Thus the emergence of sophism, which put forward a variety of doctrines, from the social relativism and contractarianism of Protagoras to the solipsistic nihilism of Gorgias, all of which denied any transcendental principle of value in terms of which the market allocation of resources could be judged and found wanting and the subordination of the polis to profit be effectively contested. Philosophy in the Socratic sense emerges out of an attempt to reground ethics in response to the sophistic critique, in order to save the polis from the profiteers and make possible an effective struggle for justice. The instrument of this sort of philosophy --dialectics-- rises through formalization to show the necessity of a transcendental principle in terms of which the universe can be explained and action guided. Thus Plato's ascent to the Good in the Republic; thus Aristotle's argument for the first unmoved mover in the Metaphysics. Both are intensely political texts, directed at grounding a critique of the market order.
Gradually, of course, dialectics becomes joined to the salvation religions, especially Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in relation to which it plays a doubly progressive role. On the one hand, the dialectical tradition helped to legitimate salvation religions which, even with all their limitations, always held over the tributary state the claim of access to a higher truth and a higher justice in terms of which the state could be judged. It must be remembered that the salvation religions, especially after the conquests of Alexander, and especially as they moved out from their points of origin on the periphery to the great urban centers, had to confront a society which was increasingly penetrated by market relationships, and which, therefore, was characterized by the same sort of skepticism and relativism which had given rise to the sophists. Dialectics provided the salvation religions with the tools they needed in order to make their doctrines credible to a sophisticated urban population. The effect was to temper the rapaciousness of the ruling classes, and ease the transition from chattel slavery to serfdom, which in turn permitted the technological innovations of the early middle ages which more than doubled agrarian productivity and made possible the urban communes and the universities of twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Anderson 1974).
Second, as the these developments got underway, dialectics, in the form of a renewed Aristotelian epistemology, cosmology, metaphysics, and ethics, began to retheorize the theologies of the salvation religions in a way which corrected some of the tributary deformations and stressed the goodness of creation and thus of matter, and the role of humanity generally, and human labor and creativity in particular, as a real participation in the life of God. This in turn provided religious legitimation for investment in the development of human capacities. This resurgent Aristotelianism also tapped into the persistent undercurrent of devotion to the Goddess, which had survived under the guise of devotion to the Virgin Mary.
The attitude of the hierarchy to these developments was ambiguous. While both the Orthodox and Augustinian forms of Neo-Platonized Christianity met the needs of the (Byzantine-imperial and European feudal) ruling classes, they presented real limitations for the Church. Neo-Platonism tended either to sacralize the political authority so that it tended to overshadow the Church, as in the East, by making it an extension of Christ's incarnate power, or else to so de-sacralize it, as in the West, that it remained beyond the reach of the Church's magisterium, which was more moral than intellectual. Thus the openness of (at least some sectors of) the hierarchy to the new sort of dialectics represented by resurgent Aristotelianism. The danger, of course, was that Aristotelian dialectics would go so far in endowing the universe generally and the secular realm in particular with meaning and purpose that revealed truth and the clerical hierarchy which was its custodian would be rendered superfluous, or else forced to radically alter its character. This danger was embodied for the clergy in the Averroist understanding of the relationship between reason and revelation, according to which everything which can be known is accessible to philosophy; religion captures the same truths less adequately, in imaginative form, for the benefit of the masses: as well as in the doctrine of the eternity of the world, which seemed to compromise divine sovereignty; and the unity of the agent intellect, which seemed to undermine the promise of personal immortality. The result was a complex dynamic in which openings to Aristotelian dialectics were followed by periods of Augustinian reaction.
There was, of course, a way out of this impasse. If one could argue both, as Aristotle did, that matter was the potential for organization and naturally ordered to God, while at the same time demonstrating the possibility and necessity of a higher, revealed truth, of which the Church alone was arbiter, it would be possible at once to argue that what happened in human society was relevant to the aims of the Church and thus a proper field for its activity, while at the same time safeguarding its radical transcendence over the secular authorities (Thibault 1972). This was the path mapped out by Thomas Aquinas and by the Order of Preachers, which pointed towards a Church which valued the full power of the human intellect, and which organized itself very much on the model of the guilds, but which recognized that in rising to God, the intellect discovered a truth deeper and more profound than it could ever comprehend by its own power, and thus conserved a place for revealed truth. Despite its power, this solution was rejected by most of the hierarchy, until the Reformation awakened it to the full implications of the Augustinian problematic. It was also rejected by a secular intelligentsia which was becoming increasingly obsessed with safeguarding its own autonomy from the clergy and which had lost sight of the larger strategic goal of a society ordered to the Common Good.
***
The failure to accept the Thomistic solution, or at least something very much like it, had disastrous consequences for the socioreligious history of Europe in the capitalist era. The triumph of the market system, as we have already noted, makes the discovery of global purpose and thus meaning and value increasingly difficult. In periods of rapid technological and economic progress this tendency is mitigated somewhat. The mysterious action of the marketplace, which bestows wealth on some while impoverishing others, without respect to obvious merit, forms the basis in experience for the Calvinist doctrines of divine sovereignty and double predestination. The demand for radical submission of the will to God is simply a reflex of an economic reality which demands submission to the mysterious imperatives of the marketplace. And the theology of St. Augustine, product of a petty commodity society, provided ready-made categories in terms of which this experience could be theorized. In periods of stagnation, on the other hand, conviction in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and thus in the existence of God tends to wane. This is reflected above all in the emergence of pessimistic cosmologies after the middle of the nineteenth century: first prophecies of imminent heat death, later the Big Bang, with its implication of either a Big Crunch or an infinite expansion and dissipation of energy. Such universes have, as we have already noted, no need for --indeed no room for-- God. Where the existence of God is affirmed under such circumstances it is always on the basis of an irrationalist leap of faith or an ungrounded religious intuition. Thus the whole line of religious existentialists and phenomenologists (Kierkegaard, Scheler, Levinas, Jaspers, etc.)
Layered over these spontaneous developments, however, is the conscious ideological strategy of the bourgeoisie. We must remember that the bourgeoisie came to power as the result of a complex process which included powerful democratic movements over which it did not always exercise hegemony --movements which reach back to the urban communes of the twelfth century and point forwards towards the socialism of the nineteenth and twentieth century. During the period of its ascent the bourgeoisie had to secure its leadership over these movements and neutralize emerging proletarian tendencies. It did this through in two distinct ways. Where technological progress was rapid and the artisanate and the peasantry weak it simply tapped into the radical Augustinianism of the Reformation, which devalued human reason and human labor, and promoted an ethos of submission. This was the strategy which the bourgeoisie opted for in England, the Netherlands, and North America. Elsewhere, generally, it ranged itself against the Church, presenting itself as an advocate of the freedom of inquiry against the claims of clerical control and of the dignity of work against clerical otherworldliness. This dual polemic, at once and at the same time against prelate and peer, made the bourgeoisie seem to be an unambiguous friend of social progress. In reality, however, it lead to the ideological disarmament of the working classes which, in rejecting reactionary religion, found themselves inadvertently rejecting the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and thus of their own labor, and denying the transcendental principles of value in terms of which the market order would ultimately need to be contested.
Once its hegemony is secure --in the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, later elsewhere-- and once the contradictions of capitalism begin to mount and an independent, increasingly socialist workers movement begins to emerge, the bourgeoisie turns and shows its true colors, and reveals the authentic implications of the atheistic doctrine it has been peddling all along. The rejection of metaphysics in English analytic philosophy (Ayer 1935), the "death of God" proclaimed by Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1889/1968), Heidegger's critique of "ontotheology" (Heidegger 1928/1968), and the postmodernist rejection of "totalizing metanarratives" (Lyotard 1979/1984) are all also a claim that there is no ground for moral discourse, no basis on which the market order might be contested. It is a claim that Communism just as much as Christianity is an illusion without a future, a sublimation of some combination of erotic and aggressive impulses which are better directed toward the only telos recognized by the reality principle: the great secular god of Consumption.
Marx and Engels stand at the cusp between the progressive and reactionary epochs of bourgeois society. The year 1848 stands as a watershed. This is the year of the last revolution in Europe in which the bourgeoisie, or at least certain fractions of the bourgeoisie, play a progressive role. It is also the first revolution with a significant socialist component. This year marks the end of the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the working classes, the beginning of bourgeois reaction. Marx is still overwhelmed by the brilliance of the progressive bourgeois polemic against prelate and peer. He is so absorbed in the (very important) struggle against Christian and especially Protestant otherworldliness that it does not even occur to him that not all religion is otherworldly or that in negating God he might be negating the very ground of the Revolution. Engels, on the other hand, succumbs to darkness and despair which gradually laid hold of Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century --not willingly, not without a struggle, but he succumbed nonetheless. And in the process he left socialism without an adequate cosmological, metaphysical, or ethical foundation, and thus vulnerable to the criticisms of Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and their postmodernist descendants.
And so we are able at last to come to an understanding of the real significance of atheism: it is a form (the main if not the only form) of the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie. By denying the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe --of the drive of matter towards increasingly complex degrees of organization-- atheism denies the ultimate meaningfulness of labor, which is our participation in that drive. Consumption is, at the very least, put on an equal par with creativity. By denying the existence of God and thus of any transcendental principle of value, atheism denies any criterion by which the market order might be criticized or an alternative allocation of resources justified. The workers' movement is reduced to just another expression of the will to power, and socialism just another totalizing metanarrative ...
Our analysis will, no doubt, be difficult to assimilate for those who have been reared on bourgeois social science --or on a dialectics which has been deformed by the dual polemics of the bourgeoisie. Why, it will be asked, if your analysis is correct, do we find so many religious reactionaries loose in the world? And are you really claiming that it is impossible for atheists to serve the cause of social progress?
The first question allows us to draw a very important conclusion of our analysis, one which will, perhaps, seem even more audacious than what we have said thus far, but which is, nonetheless, implied by it. Much of what passes for religion in bourgeois society is in fact atheism in disguise. From the very beginning the religions of the tributary states, with their transcendent divine sovereigns and their cults of violence and sacrifice, represented at least a partial loss of conviction in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and thus at best a deformed exercise of transcendental abstraction. Calvinism (and the fideist Catholicism rejected by the first Vatican Council) carry this dynamic further, denying that we can conclude from our common sense or scientific knowledge of the organization of the universe to the existence of God. Indeed, like Tezcatlipoca, the god of our religious reactionaries seems to be arrayed against the forces of life and intelligence, against the upward dynamism of matter towards higher degrees of organization. He is certainly not the God/dess of the communitarian villagers gradually discovering their own latent potential and that of everything in their environment, nor is he the wise Teacher helping her people to recover their wholeness in a time of fragmentation, and to discover meaning in conflict and contradiction. And he certainly is not the God which Israel met on the battlefield at Jezreel. One is tempted to say that the god of the religious reactionaries is in fact no god at all, but rather the great Adversary. But it is more rigorously accurate to say that their intellects have been so darkened by the alienating impact of market forces that they can no longer tell the difference.
The second question is more difficult, and requires some careful analysis. Clearly atheists do contribute to social progress. Partly they do so because they have been habituated, by the impact of nonmarket residues in the social formation, to seek goods (human development, social justice) the pursuit of which they are, however, unable to ground. And partly they do so because the progressive power of the polemic against alienated forms of religion is far from spent. The difficulty is that, unable to ground the struggle for justice, atheists are also unable to resist the corrosive impact of the market system on the ethos of each succeeding generation. We all know atheistic revolutionaries who came from religious, even conservative homes and who whose break with the otherworldly religion of their parents was an essential step in their intellectual and political development. This has been a common phenomenon for more than a century now. But we also, increasingly, meet the children of these revolutionaries, and their children's children, who have lacked the intellectual resources to resist the rising tide of nihilism and despair and who soon abandon a struggle the rationale for which they no longer understand. The same phenomenon is obvious on a larger collective scale. Clearly atheistic regimes like that in the Soviet Union ushered in periods of enormous social progress. But they were unable to adequately legitimate policies which subordinated consumption to the long term development of human social capacities --something which can be done only in the context of a doctrine which affirms the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe, in the evolution of which our labor is a real participation, and thus the reality of God whose Beauty, Truth, Goodness and Integrity draws the universe from potency to act. Thus they succumbed, at least in part, to consumerist propaganda.
We thus conclude to an audacious thesis, and one which will likely spark no end of controversy: that the principle task of progressive forces in the present period is to combat the hegemonic nihilism and despair of our time, and to restore to humanity confidence in the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe, the existence of God, and the possibility of rising, by rational means, to transcendental principles of value in terms of which alone the market order can be judged and an alternative allocation of resources justified. This does not mean purging from our ranks those who have not yet found reason to believe; our confidence must always be founded in reason. Nor does it mean conciliating those who continue to perpetuate otherworldly fantasy or who can no longer distinguish between the powers of death and the God of Life. What it does mean is restoring, through patient inquiry and vigorous dialectics, humanity's ability to see, through the present darkness, the incredible Beauty which calls us all into being, which lights our path, and which sustains us in our struggle until the day, not far off, when the darkness will lift and humanity will at long last create the conditions necessary for it to fulfill its vocation as partner and co-creator with God.
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