Does theology reflect self-interest? (another response to critics)

My recent posts described how my understanding of the relation between God and the world has changed in the past several years. One of the recurring criticisms of these posts was that my changing views were motivated by self-interest. This view was expressed by several party members of the AUFS People's Republic, as well as by some of my politically sensitive Facebook friends. A comment on my previous post states this view with admirable clarity:

Why don't you just be entirely honest with us? The real reason why you've changed your stance is because you've realized that you have a huge vested interest in keeping the status quo. I mean, you can say it's your kids and the stockholm syndrome you've developed toiling away for the system, but really at the end of the day, it's your desire to maintain your current comfortable lifestyle. Ahh, how nice it must be!

This habit of associating intellectual convictions with personal self-interest seems to be quite widespread among leftist undergraduates and other well-meaning citizens who get their Marxist theory at two or three removes.

Marx's class theory, however, was about the way broad social changes occur in history. It was not a psychological theory about the motivations of individual persons. In fact, it is axiomatic to Marx's theory that individuals are not consciously serving the interests of their class. Marx was familiar with attempts to explain historical events by uncovering the private interests of individual persons; he regarded such tactics as beneath contempt. In a letter to Engels, Marx poured scorn on a certain German historian who had reduced "the spirit of history" to "facile anecdote-mongering and the attribution of all great events to petty and mean causes" (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895, 159). Marx was emphatic about distancing his theory from "the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest" (Marx, Surveys from Exile, 176-77).

The Marxist class theory explains the way alterations occur in vast social patterns. It does not explain why the bourgeois shopkeeper sells one kind of cheese instead of another. It does not explain why intellectuals subscribe to competing views on any given topic. It does not explain why an Australian theologian might change his mind about something. Marxist class theory is a theory of historical change, not a theory of private motivations.

One of the most brilliant and influential modern revisions of Marxian theory was Foucault's theory of discourse. Like Marx, Foucault wanted to measure large historical patterns of power and interest. His work on power and discourse, so formative for contemporary critical theory, was an attempt to lay bare the vast machinery of language and institutions, not to explain why specific individuals think and act the way they do. His theory of discourse claimed to be an explanation of the whole field within which human subjectivity operates. It was not a reductionist psychological theory, as if all one's daily choices were secretly motivated by power and self-interest.

Again, it is fundamental to critical theory that the real operations of history are hidden from historical agents. (To digress for a moment, this is one aspect of what I am referring to when I compare critical theory to gnosticism: critical theory is always concerned with the acquisition of a secret knowledge that is hidden from the masses.) A theory of discourse does not imply that individual agents (or in Foucault's case, individual speakers) are motivated by power interests. To assert this would be to miss the whole significance of "discourse" as a domain that encompasses a huge diversity of competing interests and motivations. Discourse is "a space of multiple dissensions; a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described" by the critical historian (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 173).

At any rate, Foucault's concept of power has nothing to do with sentimental moral admonitions about self-interest. Power, in Foucault's vocabulary, is a morally neutral term that describes the way a particular social order is created. "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', it 'censors', it 'abstracts', it 'masks', it 'conceals'. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194).

Anyone who has understood this theory will perceive the absurdity of the claim that the views of a particular Australian theologian can be explained by unmasking his sinister power-interests. My interlocutors used their critical theory to explain why I had really changed my mind: they might just as well have used quantum theory or homeopathy to explain it.

I have no intention of advancing an alternative account of why people change their minds. Presumably each person's intellectual convictions depend on a unique configuration of culture, education, language, environment, temperament, and experience. A theory rich enough to explain all this would have to be as large as life itself. I will only venture to say that one should take it for granted, until proven otherwise, that other people's convictions are not the product of bad motives or a wicked heart.

Marx and Hitchens among the theologians?

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

For all of the claims that Christopher Hitchens has abandoned his earlier Leftist proclivities, there is at least one point at which he remains an orthodox Marxist. His recent book, God Is Not Great, is a straightforward reiteration of Marx’s own critique of religion, albeit in the most splendidly bombastic fashion:

“God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.… Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.”

Hitchens here evokes one of philosophy’s most defiant veins: the reduction of the religious impulse to the product of our basest human instincts. He thus places himself within an intellectual tradition that stretches from Kant (“we cannot conceive God otherwise than by attributing to him without limit all the real qualities which we find in ourselves”) through Feuerbach (“man – this is the mystery of religion – projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself”), until it finally reaches Marx himself (“the foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion, religion does not make man”).

But, as one might expect, Hitchens gives this tradition his own contemptuous twist. He is not content just to strip religion of its nobility, to dislodge it from its pride of place as the founding gesture of civilization – the moment when Homo sapiens, driven by its emerging thirst for transcendence, takes the first step out of the domain of primates by investing certain ritualized practices with meaning. He goes further, and dismisses religion as little more than the invention of hucksters and frauds who, at every occasion, aim to exploit our innate fears and profit from our listless servitude.

Here, again, Hitchens invokes Marx’s authority, citing his famous anti-Darwinian quip that “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape” (though he misattributes it to Engels). His point is that, even as the later manifestations of a process disclose the true nature of its origin, so too the most notorious historical examples of religious fabrication and plagiarism – from Muhammadanism and Mormonism to the preposterous “cargo cults” of Melanesia – provide a window onto religion’s murky beginnings. For Hitchens, the history of religion remains a sordid tale of outright fraudulence preying on a fearful species still trying to master the use of its opposable thumbs. Both sides are thus implicated in the sweeping verdict, “Religion is man-made.”

The basic problem with this depiction is not that it is unnecessarily pessimistic, reducing religion to a quasi-Darwinian universe of predators and prey, but that it is not pessimistic enough. It fails to go to the heart of the matter, quite literally, and identify the full reach of the religious impulse. And it is at this point that Richard Dawkins is at his best. The great (and perhaps only enduring) achievement of The God Delusion is to have radicalized the definition of “man-made,” by transferring the driver behind the religious impulse from those vulgar, primitive instincts – say, fear or predation – to the solipsism of the meme itself. In this book, Dawkins gives his fullest, though by no means best, account of the operations of the “God-meme”, which he first proposed in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene.

The meme, according to Dawkins, is a kind of replicating unit of cultural evolution, capable of adapting and spreading from one brain to another. Its logic is its own and its aim is its own survival, even at the expense of its host. Much like a virus, the meme “parasitizes” the brain, “turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation.” This is indeed a strangely speculative notion – which Daniel Dennett describes as properly “philosophical” – to find developed by so hard-shelled an empiricist. For, in effect, Dawkins is ascribing to religion a life of its own, transforming it from mere fiction to malignant idolatry. The meme is, as Marx put it, “full of theological subtleties and metaphysical niceties.”

In fact, it was Marx who first identified the enigmatic operations of the meme within economic and social life. In that most bizarre passage which concludes the first chapter of his Capital, Marx insists that in order to understand the existence and function of the commodity-form, “we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.”

An uncharacteristically intelligent amalgamation of Dawkins and Marx occurs in Michael Bay’s otherwise terrible film, The Island. Hundreds of survivors of an apparent nuclear holocaust are housed in a sterile, asexual, infinitely regulated environment – part fitness-centre, part preschool, part prison. Nevertheless, a desire grows within these innocents, a spontaneous genetic mutation which craves the corrupting excesses of Western life: the trademark vices of capitalism, from the five strips of bacon at the beginning of the film, to the “lots and lots of sex” which causes a character’s liver failure at the end. The innate lust after these vices drives the inmates to break out of their prison and discover their own garden of earthly delights on the streets of Los Angeles.

It is this idolatry – which courses like poison through our veins, accentuating the egotism of the life-instinct and parasitizing our mammalian drives – that is the real object of Marx’s and Dawkins’ attack on religion. Theirs is a powerful demonstration of the truth of Marx’s dictum, “the criticism of heaven becomes the criticism of earth”: the fight against evil in our time must begin with the opposition to every idolatry, whether religious or economic. And this is the task to which Christian theology must devote itself today.

On Capitalism, God and Mammon

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

In his review of Don DeLillo’s highly acclaimed Underworld – whose sheer size and overall chutzpah established it as the last great novel of the 20th century – James Wood observed that “the book is so large, so ambitious, that it produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ”.

I’ve often thought that the same description could apply just as easily to capitalism. Every attempt to curb its voracious appetite, to “humanise” its world-wide dominion, to place the economy back in the service of the greater good and thus temper its lust for unregulated growth, has not simply failed, but has been assimilated, folded back into the existing economic order and turned into yet another expression of capitalism itself.

Take, for example, the wide-spread use of “anti-globalisation” rhetoric by designer labels and marketing firms, or even the current wave of chic enviro-fundamentalism. In both cases, there is a kind of coming together of opposites, where two trends which are logically opposed (like popular consumerism and radical conservationism) come to occupy the same space, and seemingly without contradiction. So, the exemplary product of global capitalism are T-shirts made in Chinese sweatshops bearing the “World Without Strangers” motto.

But my favourite instance of this absorption of a potential criticism of capitalism into the inert safety of pop culture can be found in the book version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Its back cover features an endorsement, not from Sir Nicholas Stern, nor even from Tim Flannery, but from none other than Leonardo DiCaprio! (I suppose there is a connection between Leo and big chunks of floating ice – but wasn’t his problem that the ice hadn’t melted?)

Yes – capitalism, too, produces its own antibodies. And it seems that nothing is outside of its grasp.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of global capitalism is to have made choice one of those inalienable human rights, to have ensnared the very notion of democracy within an indiscriminate right-to-excess, to have transposed freedom into economic or consumptive terms. This is an achievement that DeLillo grasped in a remarkable way. As he put it in Underworld:

“Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, the convergence of consumer desire – not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.”

Choice itself has thus become the true object of human longing, a longing that has parasitised or colonised human nature itself. And so it seems that Karl Marx was right: the vision of capitalism that I’ve just described – which embraces the entire globe, which can generate more money ex nihilo through the mysteries of financial derivatives and futures speculation, which can bring together polar opposites in apparent economic harmony – is, in the end, theological. Or, to put it another way, capitalism is Mammon.

So, here’s my question: how can we take Jesus’ statement, “You cannot serve God and Mammon,” seriously when God and Mammon are now in cahoots?

Let me explain. While everyone loves to poke fun at the ridiculous platitudes of “prosperity theology”, the conspiring of God with Mammon is much, much older. Max Weber, in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, famously proposed that the capitalist disposition to earn and accumulate arose directly from the Puritan sense of calling which embraces all of life.

But now that the capitalist drive has shifted from thrift to choice, from prudence to indulgence, from accumulation to experience, the way religion operates within capitalism has also changed. Instead of a secularised motivation for work, the function of religion today more closely resembles those medieval rituals that provided sinners with the means whereby to atone for their sins.

We have our own thinly veiled forms of penance – like tithing, charitable donations, watching PBS – each of which makes us feel better about participating in decadent consumerism. And not only that, these forms of penance allow us to participate by relieving any sense of guilt.

And so it is that capitalism and charity can cohabitate. The one lets you indulge, and the other lets you get away with it. The problem at the heart of the matter is that Christianity traditionally has geared itself to dealing with the guilty conscience of the West, how to escape from the consequences of our wrongdoing. No wonder it has so readily been accommodated by capitalism as its ideal religious accessory. It was, of course, Marx that first recognised the inherent connection, the deep symbiosis between actually existing capitalism and various forms of religious belief and practice:

“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal basis for consolation and justification. It is the imaginary realization of the human essence, because the human essence possesses no true reality. Thus, the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.… The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion.”

When Marx goes on to insist that a critique of capitalism must begin with a critique of religion (“the criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth”), wasn’t he simply repeating Jesus’ warning, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them”? Such expressions of disingenuous charity – performed for one’s own peace of mind and in the service of Mammon – are the oil in the capitalist machine.

Perhaps the best way of breaking today’s alliance between God and Mammon, then, is to refuse ourselves the false comfort of token acts of charity and fashionable faith, so that we can see our behaviour for what it really is and dare really to live differently.

Now just to be clear, so that no one can come back later and accuse me of coming dangerously close to Marcionite language, let me just confirm that I am absolutely a Marcionite! Radical Paulinism – as Barth recognised in the preface to the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans – represents one of the crucial resources for opposing capitalism, liberal democracy, and the inherent idolatry that sustains them both.

Slavoj Žižek as theologian

In my struggle to make sense of the entertaining but baffling thinker, Slavoj Žižek, I’ve been reading several articles in the new International Journal of Žižek Studies.

One of the essays by my friend Scott Stephens offers a helpful account of the central theme of Žižek’s work. In this essay, “Žižek, My Neighbour: Regarding Jodi Dean’s Žižek's Politics,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 1:1 (2007), Scott characterises Žižek as the quintessential theologian of global capitalism.

“[T]he theological dimension of Capital is the fundamental determinant of Žižek’s work, the inert mass around which his entire conceptual apparatus orbits. The planetary metaphor here is not, in fact, entirely inappropriate. For as Jacques Lacan put it, the Real – the immutable is-ness of reality as such – is, like the stars, always-in-the-same-position (toujours à la même place). When Žižek states unequivocally that Capital is Real, he is making a serious claim about the ontology of our global situation: the specific nature of Capital demands an appropriate form of philosophico-political activity. Direct intervention inevitably gets folded back into the existing economic order, such that even the harbinger of the demise of global Capital – the threat of ecological cataclysm – can be transubstantiated into an expression of Capital itself. The only proper activity now is to think Capital, not as it actually exists, but theologically, at the level of its substance” (p. 3).

Scott thus insists that Žižek is not at all concerned with proposing an alternative political system to global capitalism. Rather, “the one question that matters” for Žižek is: “What do thinking and writing, as opposed to prescription and action, mean…?” The endless act of writing is thus itself Žižek’s politics, i.e., his theology. “If Marx was the one to analyze (indeed, to theologize) industrial capitalism, then Žižek is the theologian of late- or virtual-capitalism” (p. 4).

And speaking of Žižek and theology, you might like to check out this excellent online lecture by Žižek: “Why Only an Atheist Can Believe: Politics on the Edge of Fear and Trembling.”