Marxism, traditional religion, and scientific materialsim
MY FRIEND JESUISGRINGOIRE brought to my attention Michael McGoodwin's summary of On Human Nature, authored by biologist E O Wilson. I have not read the book, and consequently have no idea whether McGoodwin's encapsulation of the ideas presented therein is accurate, but one sentence in particular leaped right off the screen and straight up my nose:
The three great religion categories of today are Marxism, traditional religion, and scientific materialism.
How could anyone advance Marxism and scientific materialism as “great religion categories”? I have been mulling this over for a couple of days now and must admit to being somewhat at a loss.
Here's how my 1971 edition of The OED defines religion:
3. Action or conduct indicating a belief in, reverence for, and desire to please, a divine ruling power; the exercise or practice of rites or observances implying this.
5. Recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship; the general mental and moral attitude resulting from this belief, with reference to its effect upon the individual or the community; personal or general acceptance of this feeling as a standard of spiritual and practical life.
So, is Marxism a religion? According to applicable definitions and the accepted usage of the word, no, it is not. I can see how Marxism might exhibit certain characteristics commonly associated with religion, but that's not the same thing. For instance, I think it takes a certain degree of faith to assume that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” leads ineluctably to the establishment of a utopian, classless society. Conceivably, then, Marxism might be construed as a faith-based worldview, at least to some extent, but that does not imply that the doctrine itself is a religion in any meaningful sense.
When we turn our attention to scientific materialism, I'm afraid the answer is an even more emphatic and resounding, no. However one feels about scientific materialism and its adherents, it's intellectually dishonest to claim that a system of thought rejecting faith and belief is essentially the same as one that demands faith and belief. Here in the US, it's a straw man often found in the hands of Fundamentalist Christians, as they make their perennial attempts to force creationism on the secular world. This observation alone should give any thinking person pause before leaping to the same logical fallacy.
Refusing to admit the absence of evidence for their creator God, the Fundies turn reason on its head and loudly proclaim scientific materialism to be a religion - ie, a worldview predicated on ‘faith’ in the scientific method, or some such construct - and therefore intellectually and academically on an equal footing with their own specious claims. It's an argument without visible means of support, though. Saying a thing is so does not make it objectively so. You can clap all you want, but all that racket will not make Tinker Bell anything more than a bit of clever and endearing stagecraft.
Scientific materialism is a religion only in the sense that Mother Church once viewed Satanism as a rival ‘faith’, despite the fact that there is little if any evidence to suggest that anyone actually ‘worshiped’ Satan. What is suggested by the historical record is that there were certain sects, faiths, ideas, or spiritual practices, of which the Church disapproved. Still suffering from a banging Manichean hangover, Roman Catholicism long held that everyone was either with them or against them, either one was a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Communion of the Faithful or one had cast one's lot with “Sathan, that great enemy of God and man”, whether wittingly or not. There was no middle ground and those who thought to characterize their lack of faith in accepted dogma as something other than Satanism were simply deluded or - worse - assuming a mantel of piety in a deliberate attempt to deceive others.
Has Michael McGoodwin simply mischaracterized the ideas of E O Wilson? As I say, I haven't read Wilson's book, so cannot say for certain. I do know that, whatever he believed in 1978, Wilson certainly seems to have expressed himself differently in subsequent publications. Here is a passage from his introduction to the recent anthology, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin - PDF of the text as it appeared in Harvard Magazine:
In the more than slightly schizophrenic circumstances of the present era, global culture is divided into three opposing images of the human condition, each logically consistent within its own independent premises. The dominant of these hypotheses, exemplified by the creation myths of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), sees humanity as a creation of God. He brought us into being and He guides us still as father, judge, and friend. We interpret his will from sacred scriptures and the wisdom of ecclesiastical authorities.
The second worldview is that of political behaviorism. Still beloved by the now rapidly fading Marxist-Leninist states, it says that the brain is largely a blank slate devoid of any inborn inscription beyond reflexes and primitive bodily urges. As a consequence the mind originates almost wholly as a result of learning, and it is the product of a culture that itself evolves by historical contingency. Because there is no biologically based “human nature”, people can be molded to the best possible political and economic system, namely, as urged upon the world through most of the twentieth century, communism. In practical politics, this belief has been repeatedly tested and, after economic collapses and tens of millions of deaths in a dozen dysfunctional states, is generally deemed a failure.
Both of these worldviews, God-centered religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical worldview, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world's population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. It is the commonality of the hereditary responses and propensities that define our species. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 percent of its existence, it forms the behavioral part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called the indelible stamp of our lowly origin.
To understand biological human nature in depth is to drain the fever swamps of religious and blank-slate dogma. But it also imposes the heavy burden of individual choice that goes with intellectual freedom.
Obviously, this seems to bear only a passing resemblance to how Wilson's ideas appear in McGoodwin's summary. And for the record, I don't have a problem with anything in the above quote.
In this same introduction to Darwin's work, Wilson goes on to address the question of whether science and religion might be reconciled:
So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion. Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. In the early part of this century, the toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.
Once again, I tend to agree and I say that in spite of my own spiritual experiences and aspirations. However nice it might be to affirm and validate our religious feelings, after so many years of pandering to the religious right in this country, I don't want to see faith-based anything in the discourse of this Republic, ever again.
POSTSCRIPT: For what a right-thinking Marxist should make of E O Wilson, have a look at this dreary piece by Professor Steven J Rosenthal. The author uses the words fascist or fascism ten times in the body of this short work, and once in his introduction and again in the title, which as a sometime practitioner of japa I thought rather impressive. At one point Rosenthal seems to suggest that we should reject anything out of the biology department because the scientific wing of academia is capitalist-occupied territory. To learn the truth, apparently, one must turn to the humanities and so-called social sciences, where you'll find Marxists and other credible critics in great abundance.
Do tell.