File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0008, message 10


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gis.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: religion and politics: My prolog to a pamphlet by a Catholic Worker Activist
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 07:38:32 -0400


Hi Gary--

Alas, no Lancaster for me.  The nearest I'll get is reading one of that Bill
Shakespeare guy's history plays.  Ah well.

> Firstly the Universal guilt problem.  You write beautifully about  Reform
> Judaism and the notion of responsibility for the sin of any member of the
> community. This for me means giving concrete expression to the idea that I
> am my brother's keeper.  I am very sympathetic to this and certainly it is
> worth meditating on.  But how far does one stretch the notion of
> community?  Do we include the bourgeoisie in this?  For me absolutely not.
> The hour for universal love may have struck for Roy but for me there is to
> be no sympathy with the master class. Always, always with
> Spartacus.  Never, never with Crassus.

Given the way the notion of "community" is usually deployed within bourgeois
thought -- to efface social differences -- I'd certainly agree with you.
Yet community is another one of those dynamic nodes from which table-turning
is possible.  If we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers, then are we not
charged with criticizing them when they fail or contradict their own social
responsibilities?  Particularly if they are in positions of power?  Could
the notion of community responsibility then perhaps be a basis for an
ethical critique of the bourgeoisie?  I pose these thoughts as questions,
since they seem like possibilities with uncertain feasibility.  Yet time and
again we see that ethics and emotional responses are usually far more
powerful motivators and castigators than arguments tend to be.  Which
clearly is part of religion's hold.  And including wrongdoers within a
watchful community seems on the whole to produce better results than
excluding them (e.g. the handling of Germany after WW2 vs after WW1).

So while there is much to say against bourgeois universalism, it seems to me
that there should be ways to flip it on its head -- or maybe I should say
feet? -- for a critique of capitalist relations and in favor of socialist
universalism (one aspect of a classless society).  The content of the
universalism and the terms under which people are included within a
community are crucial.

Re the critique of the "universal guilt thesis" in DPF, I'm not in
disagreement.  But let me point out that both of the quotations refer
specifically to *individual* responsibility.  I think the idea of social
responsibility plays out rather differently.  (Unfortunately I can't check
DPF's discussion -- all my books are in boxes since I'm moving soon.)  There
is certainly a question of how social responsibility redounds on me
personally; but I find it hard to see the idea of social responsibility
implying that each individual is responsible for everything.

I'm not entirely clear what you have in mind when you write the following:

> With religion I believe the crucial dialectic is that between modernity
and
> conservativism. Here it is crucial to understand that modernity has come
to
> us in the guise of capitalist modernity.  It has proved most corrosive of
> religion which perhaps inevitably has been most closely tied to
> conservative values.  Capitalism destroys conservativism, even though
> conservatives vote for pro-capitalist parties.  It is business which has
> killed god not communism. This is  a development brilliantly captured by
> Marx in the Manifesto (All that is solid, melts into air. All that is holy
> is profaned).

Given the intense and frequently violent resurgence of religion over the
past 30 years (especially in highly conservative, "fundamentalist" forms, in
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), I'm not sure in what sense capitalist
modernity has corroded religion.  (Of course it would be very nice to say
that the various fundamentalisms are symptoms of religion's corrosion, but
somehow I doubt that'll wash.)

I don't have any quick thoughts on CR and modernity, so I'll stop here with
a birthday wish that you have a very happy year.

Cheers, T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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