But at a deeper level, isn't my answer still limited? Aren't I denying what Marx calls "self-activity", the ability of oppressed people to take matters into our own hands and to shape history. Aren't I still projecting that human activity onto God, giving God's grace credit for something which humans actually can and must do? Isn't this just another example of what Marx calls alienation or estrangement - when human beings create an idea or a material object or a social system and then endow it with power so it appears to be acting as an independent force which alienates and suppresses our own self-activity?
I think that a lot of Christians do in fact do that. We do at times abdicate our moral responsibility to change ourselves and the world, saying "I can't do anything about it, I'll just wait for God to fix it" when we can in fact do something about it and to not do anything about it is actually a sin of omission because it leads to unnecessary suffering for other people.
BUT, I think this typical Marxist criticism of Christianity is still limited. After all, the concept of "self-activity" itself can be a fetishization or projection.
Marxists and can also estrange themselves, and the intellectual concept of "self activity" is not a safegaurd against it. Like all concepts it can actually become reified, or frozen, taken out of the flow of the historical process, and turned into an idol.
As I argued in response to Pete, the idea of the "self" is itself a creation of human history... it was born with the Enlightenment and the rise of bourgeois liberalism. So this idea of a "self" that makes history is just as alienating as the idea of a God in the sky who makes history for us.
In reality, the self is an ensemble of social and material relations.... I am a relationship, not a thing, and so are you. I am far more contradictory and complex than a thing, and so are you.
So my "self activity" is also therefore more contradictory and complex, and so is yours.
So when we make history, we are not "things" empowered with force that shape a passive world... instead we are a complex part of a living, breathing web of life and we change that web as we act.
So that brings me back to prayer. Most of my prayer is not actually begging God as some detached object in the sky for favors. The deepest prayer I have ever experienced was after I read the book the Cloud of Unknowing, by a medieval Christian mystic. It argued that any image we put forward of God is actually a false idol, and to really pray we need to extinguish all notions we may have of God.
Marxism really helps with that.. it helps us walk through exercises like the one I just did above to strip away false and alienating concepts of God. That time when I read the book I remember stripping away all concepts of God and trying to pray to the Cloud of Unknowing that resulted.
At a certain point I realized that I would also have to strip away the experience of myself praying to that cloud.... if God is no thing, then my self is also no thing. And in that encounter of no thing with no thing, we actually become real. We just are what we are, and we are what we are becoming. I remember in that moment of prayer feeling more real, more connected to the world than ever because I no longer had a sense of "self" separate from the world, I was simply a part of it's process - a part with clear agency and the ability to change, not just a cog in the wheel - but a part nonetheless.
So maybe that kind of experience is what Grace really is. Grace is when our "self-activity" transcends and extinguishes self-consciousness... when we act without the false, alienating, ever-degrading awareness of being a separate self that is acting... when our action making history is not separate from the rest of history making itself - or rather all the other sentient beings making history together... when we have a deeper consciousness that goes beyond self-consciousness and is consciousness of our activity within a larger, complex, dialectical totality of life generating life.
So worship of God is not necessarily alienating... grace is not necessarily alienating. If anything, it can help us get beyond the idea of our SELF, which is a bigger fetish for those of us in 2010, and a bigger opiate of the masses than any notion of God.
Because after all, didn't Marx say that the real movement of the proletariat, it's real "self activity" in history IS communism? In other words, communism doesn't just come after the revolution, it is what we practice when we make history now through our self-activity.
But communism is the opposite of selfishness! It is love - Marx lifted the vision directly from the Book of Acts in the Bible: from each according to ability, to each according to need. So self-activity that IS communism needs to be selfless, and prayer to God as the Cloud of Unknowing is one way to live in that selfless grace.
Very well done. I deal with this internal debate on the daily, in a different way.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I appreciate that. If you don't mind me asking, how do you deal with it? (you don't have to answer if you don't want to)
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure I am convinced of any type of functional consciousness outside of that of the "self" or the mind's "I". We perceive of ourselves as separate from the rest of the world because that's the entire basis of being able to be aware of and understanding our surroundings.
ReplyDeleteI would consider myself to be pretty agnostic, but mostly in a Pascal's wager sorta way because I can't shake that old catholic guilt, and not hostile to the concept of spirituality. However I think that the forsaking of the 'self' is a particularly dangerous notion that leads easily to the destructive cult of the martyr. Isn't the forsaking of self at the root of every appeal for working people to take up arms and sacrifice themselves and others at the altar of nationalism?
To me, it's not the "self" that's the problem, but the cooptation and reification of its expression.
Raoul Vaneigem dealt with this concept of "radical subjectivity" a lot in his book "The Revolution of Everyday Life"(originally titled Treatise on Living for the Young Generations) which really shaped how I approach radicalism and I think that chapter 12, "Sacrifice", may be of interest because he comes to a very different conclusion than you in this paragraph:
No other problem is as important to me as a difficulty I encounter throughout the long daylight hours: how can I invent a passion, fulfill a wish or construct a dream in the daytime in the way my mind does spontaneously as I sleep? What haunts me are my unfinished actions, not the future of the human race or the state of the world in the year 2000. I could not care less about hypothetical possibilities, and the meandering abstractions of the futurologists leave me cold. If I write, it is not, as they say, "for others." I have no wish to exorcise other people's ghosts. I string words together as a way of getting out of the well of isolation, because I need others to pull me out. I write out of impatience, and with impatience. I want to live without dead time. What other people say interests me only in as much as it concerns me directly. They must use me to save themselves just as I use them to save myself. We have a common project. But it is out of the question that the project of the whole man should entail a reduction in individuality. There are no degrees in castration. The apolitical violence of the young, and its contempt for the interchangeable goods displayed in the supermarkets of culture, art and ideology, are a concrete confirmation of the fact that the individual's self-realization depends on the application of the principle of "every man for himself," though this has to be understood in collective terms--and above all in radical terms.
Joe, I hear you about the dangers of the concepts of "sacrifice" and "martyrdom." Part of my original piece "Problems with pacifism and prayers for a land without prayer" was a warning against the idea of martyrdom. I was trying to argue we should not aim to be martyrs for the revolution. If we die in struggle that certainly would be an honorable death but the goal of revolution is life, not war. We should never have to wish for death itself.
ReplyDeleteI am certainly against any idea of sacrifice for the nation. I am not for merging the individual subject into any type of collective totaltity, whether Nation, Race, Class, Religion, or HIstory... all of that is the road toward totalitarianism, not the road to liberation. All that does it destroy the self only to replace it with a larger and more dangerous frozen abstraction/ reification which can often just be a form of collective selfishness at the expense of another group of oppressed people.
The goal of the revolution cannot be sacrifice because after all we live in a society with post-scarcity potential where we should have to sacrifice a lot less. With the development of technology and the means of production we should be able to live in an ecologically sustainable way where there is abundance for everyone and a lot more leisure time. It is a matter of smashing capitalism which turns Technology into an alien force that oppresses us as if it has its own self-moving demonic powers. It means revamping technology and the means of production into truly human social relations that can overcome scarcity and ecological destruction. This will mean destroying some technologies, seizing and democratically operating others, and creating new ones as well.
My preoccupation in this post is not with sacrifice, it is with love. That is what draws us out of our alienation. It needs to be manifested materially in changed social relations, not just in sentimentality, as I argued in my earlier response to Pete. Love may involve some sacrifice at certain points, but we should be suspicious of any form of love which is reduced to sacrifice - it could very well be cloaking abuse or exploitation.
I am also not for some mystical merger into what Hegel mocked as a "night where all cows are black." The whole appeal of my post was to see the ecologically interconnected and constantly dialectically transforming relations that compose the self and its relationship with the world. My goal is not to deny the existence of the self, just like my goal is not to deny the existence of God. All I am saying is that we shouldn't reify/ freeze either concept in time and space. We shouldn't turn it into a "thing." We shouldn't objectify it. And we shouldn't elevate either concept to make it the agent of history in a way that takes away from our actual living breathing experience of self-activity. As the Buddhists put it, self and the annihilation of self are both preoccupations that do not lead to enlightenment... what does lead to enlightenment is mindfulness of constant change and interbeing - the ensemble of relations that compose sentient beings.
I see that as very similar to grace. Grace is when I act, when I exercise self-activity as a socially conscious subject, without the dead weight and dead time of awkward self-consciousness, and with full awareness of the constantly transforming, dialectical interconnections that knit together reality.
I think Christian prayer , Buddhist mediation, and Marxist methodology all can help open up situations where we can experience this grace.
I guess I may be an egoist to a fault here then, because I've been wracking my brain trying to think of whether or not the transcendence of self is desirable(or even possible, though those who believe in a spiritual dimension of consciousness certainly think so) and I just end up skeptical which basically brings me at a dead end if I don't want to get into questions of faith. In the end here, after your clarification, I guess I don't have much to say after all other than I get a little spooked at the idea of abandoning self-consciousness.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I don't really have a problem with selfishness in the abstract. When realized collectively, as Raoul V. explains in that quote, it serves as a fine starting point for revolutionary consciousness.