Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 10:37:29 -0800 (PST)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] American identity, religion and politics


God is Dead, Long Live the Civil Religion?
American Identity, Religion and Political Conservatism

This piece was written in response to a right-wing
Christian on an elist, who maintains that America was
“founded” on the basis of the Ten Commandments and
Christianity, as a basis for moral judgement.  This is
an increasingly common view among Americans of the
kind who support the likes of Bush, yet it is
misleading both historically and in terms of
expressing the potential of the present.  It misreads
a historical past, but, in doing so, it also
mistakenly constructs the historical past as
necessarily dictating to the social present.  It thus
turns upside-down the emancipatory arrangement of
forces – instead of desires motivating social forces
which in turn create history, it is the historical
past – or rather, an ahistorical, mythical version of
it – which dictates to social forces, which in turn
suppress desires.  An equivalent in the sphere of
ideas to the operation of commodity fetishism, in
which relations between people come to seem as
relations between things, this arrangement can only be
enforced by social and psychological repression.

America is almost the only country to have the
stupidity to claim that a specific group of people
Founded it as a Nation at a specific time; all other
countries seeing their evolution into the present as a
hodgepodge of historical traditions which have changed
and adapted over time.  The only other countries which
believe they were Founded are Stalinist ("communist")
countries such as the old USSR.  Of course, other
countries also have their nationalist myths, but these
myths are nowhere so blatantly ideological as in
America.

In my view, this idea that the nation has "Founders"
is very harmful, because it leads to an ideologised
judgement of who belongs to the "nation" - whereas
someone is French, British, German, Japanese, etc.,
simply by living in a particular space, one is only
"American" if one holds specific beliefs, and these
beliefs are imposed dogmatically on Americans in a way
which echoes with totalitarian ideologies - for
instance, the oath of allegiance in schools.  The idea
that the nation must be loyal to its "Founders" is a
denial of the freedom of actually-existing Americans
to create and "constitute" their own life-world; it is
a positing of reality as "constituted" when the point
should instead be to posit our own activity as
"constitutive" and creative of realities, often of new
realities which improve on the past.

The "Founders" image of America links to various
ideological constructions, one of which is what
political scientists call the "civil religion" - a
worshipful attitude to political institutions and
traditions which is unhealthy in generating uncritical
conservatism towards them.

The founding of America is a myth - maybe a
deliberately cultivated myth.  There have been people
living in North America for centuries.  The so-called
"founders" ignored these earlier cultures and
exterminated the indigenous population as far as they
could.  They also overlooked the enslavement of black
people across the whole of the US and especially the
south, which many of them explicitly endorsed and
benefitted from.  Other parts of America were seized
in militarist adventures from Mexico and incorporated
along with a Hispanic population.  And women were
ignored in the early US as well.  So the "Founders"
were only a tiny minority of the "nation" they lorded
it over.  Yet the claim made by those who refer back
to the Founders and the foundation of the nation is
that they somehow express a universality of all
Americans which, in terms of the actual inhabitants of
the area controlled by the American state, they
patently lack.

The philosophy they used was NOT a comprehensive
religious doctrine; it was an attempt, in line with
the political science of the day, to set up a stable
republic which balanced liberal and democratic
elements to create social stability and freedom for
property owners.  Yes, LIBERAL - which in
pre-twentieth-century terminology meant all the
various kinds of of protections of individual
"freedoms" (both good ones like privacy, and bad ones
like "free trade") by means of constitutional and
institutional guarantees, as opposed to simple
majoritarianism (rule by the largest number).  The
"Founders" were all representatives of the ruling
class in the northeast at the time, with very specific
interests in what political governance should be FOR. 
It was about protecting specific rights and freedoms –
those of particular in-groups – while also avoiding
the harmful effects (for these groups) of other
political forms in existence at the time.

The idea that this liberalism is compatible with any
kind of theocracy is absurd.  Any examination of
liberal thought from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries reveals that an avoidance of religious bases
for political action is a constant refrain, even
though most liberals were devout Christians.  The
reason is that liberals generally wished to avoid the
disastrous Wars of Religion which were tearing through
central Europe at this time (a fear which later, after
the French Revolution, also shifted into a fear of
what would later be termed "totalitarian" ideological
regimes).  They wished to enable believers to live
devout lives, without belief becoming the basis for
political power.  Hence the fear of human beings in
powerful positions, the desire for checks and
balances, separation of church and state, judicial
independence, etc etc (all very standard liberal
principles).

Yet this "Founding", like any tradition, has no
meaning "in itself" in terms of its relevance for the
present.  The transmission of tradition, as every
professional hermeneutician realises, is mediated by
present meanings.  The Constitution etc. are only as
real as their actualisation IN THE PRESENT, which is
solely a function of how they are activated in current
discourses by social forces capable of mounting social
action and legitimating it in such terms.  Since the
liberalism of the era of early America is barely with
us today (because the social structure has changed),
the main choice is whether to run with the
emancipatory aspects or the authoritarian, order-based
aspects.  The former leads to a more-or-less anarchist
or socialistic critique of liberalism, the latter to a
fascistic degeneration of liberalism into an empty set
of hurrah-words used to justify rule by the
military-industrial complex and the systematic
manipulation of "public opinion" by “opinion leaders”
such as local religious leaders, televangelists,
talk-show hosts and Fox News.

American identity, like most national identities, is
constructed primarily out of myths, of the Barthesian
type (a myth being a second-order signification in
which an already constituted sign with a direct
referential meaning is plucked out of its contingent
context and turned into a symbol of something else,
which it connotes rather than denotes, and which is
usually an ahistorical entity, a "-ness" of the thing
itself which reifies and essentialises its identity). 
In his essay "The Other America", Edward Said
summarises American ideology - the "consensus" of the
American mainstream - in terms of a series of
"narrathemes" which recur in it:  a collective "we"
represented by leaders; a dismissal of history; an
uncritical sense of one's rightness which reduces
disagreement to "jealousy" or "anti-Americanism"; and
an image of leaders as bearers of moral wisdom.  The
"we" is, of course, a myth covering over the social
conflicts and differences within American society,
while the hostility to outsiders involves a blissful
ignorance of how the rest of the world thinks and
lives.

In my view, one should never identify with a "nation",
especially not one with an ideological identity.  To
think freely and critically, one must be of (or at
least, identify with) the "anti-nation" - of that
which is repressed in order to construct the illusory
representation of the "nation" of a totality.  In
Francoist Spain, there was a concept of "Spain and
anti-Spain" - Spain was the Francoist Spain, and the
anti-Spain was the remnant of the other Spain, the
other world, which was smashed in the Spanish
Revolution.  (Similarly the "un-American activities"
of McCarthyism and the "anti-Soviet activities" of the
Soviet legal code).  In a way, this captures an aspect
of every national identity.  In America, the "other"
of American identity is extremely large - it is the
enslaved blacks, the almost-exterminated First
Nations, the "criminals" and the "anti-social", the
challengers of religious and heterosexist orthodoxy
and the "abnormal" of whatever kind (gays, lesbians,
mad people, social nonconformists, protesters,
hippies)... and even animals and the environment, as
the disavowed of the Enlightenment project of
dominance over nature.

Said's call is for the uncritical "we" of the American
"consensus" to be supplanted by what he calls the
Other America - a proliferation of groupings which do
not fit into the orthodox picture and which undermine
the image of the nation as a singular whole, instead
turning it into a network of different entities which
can be articulated in various ways and which overflow
and undermine unitary identities.  Where he does not
go far enough is in nevertheless failing to challenge
national identity as a whole.  Taking his project a
step further, one comes to the Deleuzian or
Proudhonian image of social association as simply
articulation and federation of diverse units, with no
reduction to a wholeness or totality holding the units
together.  Furthermore, this plethora of forces finds
itself counterposed to the forces of homogeneity and
consensus-construction, so they do not merely weaken
it but overcome it - they are not merely the other
America, but in a certain sense, are the anti-America
(in the same sense that the defeated revolutionaries
were the anti-Spain) - that which is in America which
is more than America, and which tends to exceed and
escape it - thereby becoming part of the excess which,
in order to construct a totalised entity, needs to be
repressed and held "in place".

The need, therefore, is not simply for another
America, but for the molecular America, the America of
molecular forces irreducible to the "national" whole,
to break down the totality of "America" itself and to
deterritorialise and reconfigure the very elements of
tradition they use - maybe even to do away with such
elements of tradition in a pursuit of a constitutive
power, of forces of newness rather than of
conservation.  The molecular America is necessarily,
to the molar America of repressive totality, an
"un-American" force.  But it is only through such a
force that the repressive power of nationalist myths
can be overcome.

Andy


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