The Materialist Conception of History and its Dissenters
The book Comparative Religion is proving interesting, even though the author is rather prone to the late Victorian and early twentieth century vice of peppering what is really a fairly academic book with irrelevant and slightly awkward anecdotes. The following, the closing sentences of Chapter IV, is a good example of an interesting point followed by an odd anecdote:
In India it is worth recording that an image is only an object of religious devotion after it has been "quickened", i.e. consecrated by a Brahmin priest, so that the Divinity concerned can be said to have made the idol "an effectual sign". This necessary condition once led to a curious controversy at a railway good-office in India, where freight was being levied upon some (literal) household gods that were being moved by train, and the official urged that if they could not be proved to have been "quickened", they would have to be charged for as furniture. As idols, they might have received a free pass!
I understand why the anecdote was there - it shows the importance attached to the sacramental role of the Brahmin and the "quickening". But the anecdote is simply a bit stupid, as again in this short passage:
Many of the members of sub-human species have a rudimentary sense of awe and "spookiness". Dr. Oman tells a story of a horse he was riding in the Highlands which showed signs of this "primal numinous awe".
Really? The horse was feeling "primal numinous awe"? It wasn't just thinking, "Get off my back, you strange animal, or at least slow down"? The statement is an interesting one and thought-provoking; the anecdote is stupid.
Anyway, the main thought that I have had from reading it was a feeling that he'd missed something big in the following passage:
We have to take account of certain great changes in the organisation of human society. Two of these have occurred in our own time: the coal and the petrol revolutions. Others came much earlier, at long intervals. One of the first was the discovery of how to store food for the next year, or for the winter or rainy season; another was the discovery that it was possible to save seeds or roots and plant again, and so to increase the amount of food. Then came the breeding and domestication of animals, whether for slaughter or transport. These led to vast increases in population, and so to swarming, raids, migration and colonisation. Another discovery was how to make fire, another was the use of metals, and yet another the use of wheeled transport. At first there were only hunters and fishers, people living from hand to mouth, or collecting. Then came farmers in villages and townships by the great rivers, along valleys or streams, on the banks of lakes or lagoons, and among the delta swamps. These communities were not isolated, but developed trade and marketing; and leisure arose, partly from the discovery or belief that certain days were unlucky or taboo for working (so that people as it were "institutionalised their fear", especially of the moon), partly from the consideration that you cannot do the same things all the year round, so that when ploughing or sowing is completed, there is a gap in activities.
Argh! He describes in such sincere detail the technological developments in the forces of production that led to an increased amount of produce. But instead of noting that these technological advances resulted in a surplus of production that was then used to support a non-productive class of leaders and priests who instituted and enforced social formalities, he gets it the wrong way around and claims that leisure came from the beliefs about taboo days - which were only made possible by the technological advances that he listed first.
Bouquet's lack is of an understanding of the materialist conception of history. He lists facts very well, and very clearly (I am enjoying the book), but then goes on to draw fanciful upside-down interpretations of them. I think that it is hard to express my sentiments here better than Marx does in the Afterword to the second edition of Das Kapital:
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
"It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell": a homily for our times.
In India it is worth recording that an image is only an object of religious devotion after it has been "quickened", i.e. consecrated by a Brahmin priest, so that the Divinity concerned can be said to have made the idol "an effectual sign". This necessary condition once led to a curious controversy at a railway good-office in India, where freight was being levied upon some (literal) household gods that were being moved by train, and the official urged that if they could not be proved to have been "quickened", they would have to be charged for as furniture. As idols, they might have received a free pass!
I understand why the anecdote was there - it shows the importance attached to the sacramental role of the Brahmin and the "quickening". But the anecdote is simply a bit stupid, as again in this short passage:
Many of the members of sub-human species have a rudimentary sense of awe and "spookiness". Dr. Oman tells a story of a horse he was riding in the Highlands which showed signs of this "primal numinous awe".
Really? The horse was feeling "primal numinous awe"? It wasn't just thinking, "Get off my back, you strange animal, or at least slow down"? The statement is an interesting one and thought-provoking; the anecdote is stupid.
Anyway, the main thought that I have had from reading it was a feeling that he'd missed something big in the following passage:
We have to take account of certain great changes in the organisation of human society. Two of these have occurred in our own time: the coal and the petrol revolutions. Others came much earlier, at long intervals. One of the first was the discovery of how to store food for the next year, or for the winter or rainy season; another was the discovery that it was possible to save seeds or roots and plant again, and so to increase the amount of food. Then came the breeding and domestication of animals, whether for slaughter or transport. These led to vast increases in population, and so to swarming, raids, migration and colonisation. Another discovery was how to make fire, another was the use of metals, and yet another the use of wheeled transport. At first there were only hunters and fishers, people living from hand to mouth, or collecting. Then came farmers in villages and townships by the great rivers, along valleys or streams, on the banks of lakes or lagoons, and among the delta swamps. These communities were not isolated, but developed trade and marketing; and leisure arose, partly from the discovery or belief that certain days were unlucky or taboo for working (so that people as it were "institutionalised their fear", especially of the moon), partly from the consideration that you cannot do the same things all the year round, so that when ploughing or sowing is completed, there is a gap in activities.
Argh! He describes in such sincere detail the technological developments in the forces of production that led to an increased amount of produce. But instead of noting that these technological advances resulted in a surplus of production that was then used to support a non-productive class of leaders and priests who instituted and enforced social formalities, he gets it the wrong way around and claims that leisure came from the beliefs about taboo days - which were only made possible by the technological advances that he listed first.
Bouquet's lack is of an understanding of the materialist conception of history. He lists facts very well, and very clearly (I am enjoying the book), but then goes on to draw fanciful upside-down interpretations of them. I think that it is hard to express my sentiments here better than Marx does in the Afterword to the second edition of Das Kapital:
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
"It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell": a homily for our times.