Taking pause on religion, materialism and the way forward

So I’ve been returning to some old friends, thinking about Christmas past, relentless and garish as ever, as usual. As one pal commented long ago: “Nothing but a capitalist conspiracy!” And as another said to me more recently: “I’ve had it.”

Humbug is all very well but there’s always more to it. So instead of Dickens, or anything like him, I dug out a book I first read about 40 years ago and turned up this paragraph. Take a deep breath.

“When Lenin presses his opponents on the question of the existence of nature before man and on the question of the relationship between thought and the brain, when he states that ‘sensation depends on the brain, nerves, retina, etc, ie on matter organised in a definite way’ and that ‘sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme-product of matter organised in a particular way’, when he exposes the religious and obscurantist elements which exist in even the most up-dated ‘immanentism’, he demonstrates an awareness that materialism is much more than a gnoseological theory. Materialism entails also the recognition of man’s animality (superseded only in part by his species-specific sociality); it is also the radical negation of anthropocentrism and providentialism of any kind, and it is absolute atheism.”

“Wow!” I thought. (Which is an old Scots word, incidentally, first printed in Gavin Douglas’s 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, The Eneados).

That paragraph is by the Italian scholar of classical philology, Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000), from his book On Materialism, translated by Lawrence Garner (London: New Left Books, 1975).

Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro

Timpanaro was prominent among socialist political thinkers, re-evaluating the great poet Leopardi and rereading Freud in an iconoclastic critique published in English as The Freudian Slip (1976). In the late 1970s, I remember reading this paragraph to a friend of mine and he listened intently, then stared at me and said: “Let me read that again.” And he did, silently, and then looked back up at me and smiled: “That’s wonderful. What a great paragraph. Let me remember that every night when my head hits the pillow and I’ll sleep a happy man.”

But there’s a problem. And it’s in that final word, “atheism”. I’ve never felt easy with it but not for the obvious reason. And then a few years ago, I came across these paragraphs: “A discussion of what one believes usually begins or leads to the question of ‘God’. ‘Do you believe in God?’. Through many European centuries it has been at least socially unacceptable, often dangerous, and sometimes suicidal, to answer in the negative. The freedom to answer is therefore something to be affirmed and protected: and if I am to give a short answer, that is what mine must be.

“My dislike of the short rough answer springs, not from uncertainty, but from a disinclination to give the question the status, which such an answer confers, of something entirely meaningful. What am I saying I don’t believe in if my answer is no?

“To concede that one understands this is to turn the negative into a form of denial: ‘God may exist but I refuse to believe it.’ I prefer to see ‘God’ as a word to which there is nothing objective corresponding – a word which usage over time slowly defined, and then knowledge over time rendered a nonsense.

“I know, and accord qualified respect to, the traditions which pertain to the word. I see no reason to question the authenticity of subjective experiences which many distinguished, and many more undistinguished, persons have reported, and which give the word force and significance in their lives.

“That tells me something about the human psyche and about how language works; it tells me nothing at all about the larger facts of the universe we occupy. If every person in the world believed the moon was made of green cheese that would not make it so.

“So my intellectual position is subtly, but I think significantly, different from both atheism and agnosticism. The atheist denies God exists; the agnostic doesn’t know. For me the word ‘God’ lacks a referent; lacks objective meaning; and consequently uncertainty about, or denial of, God’s ‘existence’ are equally without meaning.”

That’s by the New Zealand poet, novelist and literary critic CK Stead, from an essay entitled “What I Believe”, collected in his book The Writer at Work: Essays (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000), pp.200-206. It gets much closer to what I’ve been thinking and am reminded of every year, forcibly, not only by the “festive season” but by so much in contemporary culture – especially political culture – that insists on obeisance to words that either have no referent or have been hijacked by regimes of power inimical to what I hold to be most valuable.

CK Stead

So what is most valuable?

Well, here’s CK Stead again: “People must be free to believe and worship as they choose; only their actions consequent upon belief must be limited by the general good as that is expressed in the laws of society. But believers should not be spared our negative opinions. For too long in our society Christianity has been sheltered by privileges and pieties.”

AND not only Christianity. You might add a number of other doctrines and priorities “sheltered by privileges and pieties”. There’s no shortage of them. But this isn’t a call to militant action, simply a patient attempt at understanding. Stead goes on: “But there is a wisdom which stands separate from action. Religion once provided it, and still enshrines much that is durable. […] But as the force of religion has receded, contradicted and eroded by the revelation of what might be called its errors of fact, the respect given to the arts has advanced. […] “There is in Western civilization a large minority of sensitive, intelligent, and usually productive people whose lives are given shape, order, meaning, a sense of elevation and a certainty of purpose, by the pursuit of the best in music, painting, literature and film. These works of art are their shrines and chapels, their source of enlightenment, order, and hope.

“I have gradually come to separate two modes of thought and action, each of which has its place in what I conceive to be the good life. One is the political mode, the other (for lack of a better word) the existential. It is as though we need to be involved in the folly of politics […]. But if we are not to be frustrated […] there must be that other, wise, contemplative self [and] a wisdom beyond politics which must govern the best in poetry and fiction.”

Well, I thought, that’s all right – up to a point. I’m still uneasy with the division. It feels too neat. Stead gets it right when he says in the same book, in a different essay: “English in Our Schools” (pp.102-113): “Great literature is unsafe; it’s subversive; the moralist has never been able to depend on it. It teaches that life is more complex than religions and ideologies want us to believe. It mocks empires and scorns bureaucracies. It teaches scepticism. It sometimes sets beauty in competition with virtue, and lets beauty win. It excites the mind and imagination to reach beyond the limits of the ordinary and the good-orderly. It tells the hard truths. It shows life as it really is, not as we think it ought to be.”

SO it isn’t simply a matter of literature and the arts replacing religion, nor of a balance between separate realms of “thought” and “action”. Understanding it is all more complex, interwoven, nuanced, full of interdependencies, tensions and strengths.

Is there any underlying principle that helps with such understanding?

I was digging through some old notes, as well as old books, and came upon a few paragraphs that seem to answer that question. These were hand-written. I had copied them from a manuscript I read in Edinburgh University Library an even longer time ago. I’d gone to the trouble of typing them up on my grandfather’s old portable Remington.

I can recognise the typeface. They come from a letter Hugh MacDiarmid wrote defending his position as a Marxist to his mentor, friend and teacher, the composer Francis George Scott (1880-1958). There’s no date on the manuscript [five pages, Edinburgh University Library, Gen 887, H.65-9 E67/9)] but I suspect it’s from the 1930s. Here they are. Let’s see what we make of them.

Karl Marx (Image: free)

“Marx’s social philosophy is an attempt to discover, and to help to bring into existence, the social, cultural, and educational conditions under which all men and women may develop significant human personalities. The belief of religious advocates, e.g. Jacques Maritain, in a ‘personality’ which can exist independently of physical, biological, historical and cultural conditions is a consequence of bad psychology and still worse metaphysics.

“It is in Marx’s scientific critique of abstractions that his irreligion lies and not in the village atheism with which it is confused by many Marxists and most non-Marxists alike. This critique of abstractions constitutes the gravest challenge to the philosophy and theology of Maritain and all his kind. For it cuts all dogmas at their root, especially those based on what is called analogical knowledge of proportionality, and reveals them as the conceptual instruments of systematically cultivated obscurantism.

“He is always asking: what is the earthy and empirical basis for unearthly and non-empirical dogmas? In the abstractions of theology he finds a fetishism of words which conceals specific historical or organizational needs. In the abstractions of economics he finds a fetishism of commodities which conceals the fact that men today are controlled by the very forces of production which they themselves create. In the abstractions of jurisprudence he finds a fetishism of principles which conceals the genuine power distributions in society.

“Each set of abstractions is accompanied by a set of practices. Since these abstractions are non-empirical and non-historical, the only meaning that can be assigned to them is in terms of these very practices. Wherever abstractions are worshipped, whether it be in theology, politics or physics, the task of scientific (materialistic) method is to locate the concrete situation in which they were first introduced, to observe the practices (Praxis) which they set up, and their subsequent career in stopping more fruitful modes of procedure in similar situations.”

Wow, again. And with that, if it’s too late now to say Happy Christmas, nevertheless: all the best for 2020 – and further. Here’s hoping the decade ahead brings “more fruitful modes of procedure” to us all!