Role of Religion in Human History: Interview with Alexander Saxton By Political Affairs 3/21/07 http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/5021/1/248/
I've read and possibly commented on Saxton's Monthly Review interview. Here I'm extracting some quotes of particular interest. --------- <quote> Marxists usually assume that religion is approximately like Christianity as it was in the early nineeteenth century. That is, they take Judaeo-Christian monotheism as an "ideal type," or prototype, of all religion. They get this from Hegel. It fits neatly into ideological arguments that make religion part of the apparatus of ruling class domination. These doubtless are accurate descriptions of the way religion works in class societies. But they lack historical depth because they contain no account of the origin of religion. Early Marxists conceived ideology as obscurantist: it was how a ruling class manipulated ideas about law, government, philosophy (especially about religion) to obscure the exploitive power of the ruling class. This makes ideology a product of class conflict; but class conflict could not have begun -- and Marx and Engels did not think it began -- early in history. Human societies had to have existed a long time before you get to a division of labor that could make classes, and class exploitation, possible. And if religion began only at that point, there would remain a long gap in the so-called hunter-gatherer period (of which Marx and Engels were well aware and sometimes referred to as "primitive communism") before religion could have emerged or assumed any significant cultural role. Yet obviously religion must have existed during this long time span. Then, what was it doing? What was its function in the evolution of human culture? This is the area I think needs to be explored in a Marxist critique of religion. Why is this worth bothering about? The intellectual goal of the entire Marxian movement has been to construct a materialist interpretation of history. Religious or spiritual belief negates materialist interpretation. Consequently, in order to claim any sort of persuasive power, a materialist interpretation of history must begin with a secular and materialist explanation for the origin of religion. That was exactly where Marx and Engels began, but were obliged to postpone the task; and later Marxists have not filled the gap. My own book is an attempt to reopen this part of the agenda. <end quote> ----------------- COMMENT: I am not familiar with all the literature written on the subject, so I don't know if Marxists have so thoroughly failed. The average treatment of the subject is inadequate for just these reasons, ignoring the deeper roots of magical thinking and the management of violence. The next quote is part of a discussion of liberation theology. -------------------- <quote> Resistance groups, working in the tradition of liberation theology, will invoke religious precepts like the Golden Rule in defense of exploited working people. But to stand against their own reactionary clergies, they will need powers of demonstration that can come only from outside religion. Liberationists inside will need to collaborate with non-believers outside. Might there be signals exchanged, then, simply at the level of human survival? Believers and non-believers, actually, have a lot in common. They both are vulnerable to so-called "worldly loves." (Yet note how negative a connotation religion attaches to that luminous phrase!) They both are likely to feel parental affections normally held for children, as well as that irresistible romantic sympathy with young people in love -- hoping things might go well for them! It is these overlaps of shared experience, I think, that contain our best hopes for resolving the crises of the twenty-first century this side of global disaster. But I want to express this same idea in more general terms. All great movements of history have brought people together to work for immediate, urgent purposes, even while they might be disagreeing on other matters. What was crucial was not total agreement but confidence and honest disclosure. We are all better off because people like Tom Paine and Robert Ingersoll dared speak frankly about religion. And we would all be a lot better off today if the Marxist critique of religion could have been completed fifty years ago. <end quote> ---------------------- Now, a quote on the nature-nurture issue. ------------------- <quote> I began my career as a historian firmly convinced there was an absolute division between biology and culture. Long before that, as an undergraduate in college, I had read Franz Boas, who in his great book The Mind of Primitive Man showed that so-called "primitive" languages are capable of the same precision in physical, logical and moral expression as the most modern of modern languages. He used this line of argument to reject biological racism and refute the then-widely held beliefs in "essentialist" differences among differing "racial" (and gender) populations of the human species. Of course as you indicate in your question, many such beliefs are still held today; but Boas was absolutely correct in rejecting them. He died in the 1940s. Since then there have been extraordinary breakthroughs in fields of linguistics, genetics, evolutionary biology, archaeology, early anthropology. The entire picture has changed since Boas' time. Were he still alive I am sure he would welcome and rejoice in these breakthroughs. They reinforce his conclusions about race and racial differences although they render obsolete some of his leading assumptions. One of these was that of a sharp dividing line between biological evolution and human culture. I have already acknowledged that was my own starting point, but that stance is no longer tenable. What we see now is not two separate realms, but a complex overlapping and interpenetration by various processes of evolutionary change. Culture is biological -- although biology is not necessarily cultural. But for the human animal culture became an essential part of its biological equipment. We were talking earlier about adaptive traits. Culture, for humans, is THE chief adapative trait, directly responsible for their dominating role in the biology of planet Earth. You say in your question that racists and sexists use biological arguments. Of course they do, but that does not make their arguments valid or persuasive. Racists and sexists have been drawing false arguments from religion, history, culture, biology, for the past 3- or 400 years. So we reject them. In my own case, what convinced me as to the interpenetration of culture with biology was the work of Noam Chomsky, whom no one certainly could accuse of being racist, sexist, anti-democratic or libertarian. Chomsky, in his research on the origin of language, presents cultural continuities (like language) as beginning within evolutionary biology and then developing, not separately from biology, but as part of the ongoing process of cultural evolution. My own treatment of religion in this book represents an attempt to construct a comparable explanation for the origin and development of religion. Yes, it IS part of culture; but also an adaptive trait which enhances the survival-power of the human species, up till, of course, the historical change we have already discussed. Making culture part of biological process does not mean subordinating culture to biology. On the contrary, culture is the apex, the culmination. <end quote> ----------------------------- _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
