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Karl Marx's inherited expectation of a Messianic age resonated with those, like Christopher Hitchens,
who have a familial and biological connection to the religion, but will not serve its God.
Messiah's reign was devolved downward, toward, "We, on the other
hand, will have this heaven on earth." (quote from 'A Communist
Confession of Faith' by Moses Hess, Capitalism Magazine, 21 January 2003), but still
recognizable. Even those who sympathized with him had to acknowledge where
the idea came from: "Marx's concepts are rooted in Prophetic
Messianism, in Renaissance individualism, and in enlightenment
humanism." (Erich Fromm, May Man Prevail? Kindle
location 845). The strange result was an ideology that appealed practically not at
all to its purported target market, the 'workers,' but greatly
excited underemployed intellectuals, especially underemployed Jewish
intellectuals: "Not many Jews were Bolsheviks, but many of the
leading Bolsheviks were Jews." ('A People's Tragedy, The Russian
Revolution,' by Orlando Figes, p. 676). The very few ethnic Russians in the
party leadership, like Molotov, were prized possessions. The perception that a
disproportionate number of the Bolshevik butchers, like Hungary's Bela Kun, were of Jewish extraction,
led to a European antisemitic backlash of lethal proportions.
Marxism used to be called 'the opiate of the intellectuals,' with good cause.
Was it not oddly jarring that atheistic 'science' had 'discovered' that a
particular religious tenet, the Messianic age, was an inevitable
historical development? Science predicts: human history will end in bliss!
While it's refreshing to watch economic historians at work who are
not in thrall to uniformitarianism, the result perplexes: what past
processes can have been investigated in operation which would
invariably produce this never heretofore seen result? While Karl Marx is
capable of writing about his religious heritage in a way that can
only be described as self-loathing: "Money is the jealous god of
Israel, beside which no other god may exist." (Karl Marx, On the
Jewish Question, p. 37, Karl Marx: Early Writings, translated and
edited by T. B. Bottomore)— the continuity is even more striking.
Karl Marx was baptized as a six-year old child, though not as the
result of a religious conversion on the part of his father: "Marx's
grandfather was rabbi in Trier until his death in 1789; his uncle
was still the rabbi. His mother came from a long line of famous
rabbis and scholars. . .But Marx's father, Heinrich, was a child of
the enlightenment, a student of Voltaire and Rousseau. He was also
an ambitious lawyer." (Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 312).
In the social conditions of the era, this sympathizer of the French
Revolution could find opportunity by discarding a religious
identification which no longer meant much to him, in exchange for a
new one which meant nothing: "Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who had
himself baptized the year after Karl Marx, referred to the act
contemptuously as 'an entrance-ticket to European society.'" (Paul
Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 312). As the experience of the
Spanish Marranos demonstrates, many of these people found it easier
to renounce Judaism than to cease believing in it, in however distorted or
underground a form.
If young Karl Marx held any
favorable views of Christianity at the time of his baptism, these
had evaporated by the time he wrote Das Kapital, by which time he had adopted
the usual leftist tendency to blame Christianity for all the ills of
the world. Quoting with approval a 'specialist' on Christianity, discussing
European colonialism, he says, "'The
barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian
race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they
have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any
other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless
of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.'" (Karl Marx, Das
Kapital, Volume 1, Part 8, Kindle location 12046). Who thinks
Christians are a 'race,' I don't know, but although baptized, as were many German Jews
of the day, the Karl Marx who enters into the nineteenth century debate
about socialism was an avowed atheist.
Which is not to say that the ghosts of the older forms had
vacated the premises; they had not. Marx transmutes his materials as expertly as an alchemist, weaving together a
little of the old and a little of the new. The Golden Age at the end of
history is a Bible idea. There's nothing wrong with the concept, provided
you are in a position to deliver on it. Of course they were not, and so the
product is no longer much in demand. In its hey-day, it was a popular product,
an all-purpose theory-of-everything, marketed as 'science.' Oddly enough,
the millennium, having fallen out of favor in 'liberal' religion, resurfaced as
secular economics; except it wasn't really secular, and it wasn't
really economics.
The mislabeled 'enlightenment' did not demand that people employ the scientific method, but
only that whatever they were selling, it must be marketed as 'science,' and Marxism complied
with instructions, as did Freudianism and other 'isms.' These innovations
were understood to be 'scientific,' not because any evidence was
ever presented as tending to validate them,— in the nature of things, there could be
nothing like that,— but rather because they were faultlessly materialistic and
anti-supernaturalistic.
What is History?
In classical antiquity, historians looked upon the actual course
of history as and experimental laboratory adjunct to politics. While
factors of geography, climate, and unpredictable weather, seismic
occurrences and epidemic disease certainly played a role in human
history, the same society in the same place under the same
circumstances might experience very different outcomes, depending
upon the political model adopted. Since the city-states of antiquity
took up just about every possible idea, and some pretty impossible
ones, ranging from Bolshevism to the Phalange, a pretty good
database could be compiled of actual outcomes, to go along with the
theoretical presentation of political alternatives. Thus history was
one of the humanities, it dealt with matters of human interest,
chiefly politics.
An example of the classical approach would be to point out that
socialism was given a full and fair trial during the twentieth
century, and produced depressingly uniform results. Even in the
sporadic experiments of the twenty-first century, the inevitable
empty store shelves recur again and again. Reportedly, the average
Venezuelan has lost nineteen pounds thanks to socialism. For those
who were overweight to begin with this might be welcome news, for
others, not so much, nor is waiting in line how most people want to
spend their lives. Socialism doesn't work. History teaches this, as
nothing else can. Experience is a hard teacher, but in the end, she
brooks no contradiction.
We still read the classical historians, because their way of doing
history is evergreen. But there are other approaches. German thinkers longed to find ultimate meaning in human
history,
"At an early age, when the dawn of science appeared to
my sight in all that beauty which is greatly diminished at the noon
of life, the thought frequently occurred to me whether, as
everything in the world has its philosophy and science, there must
not also be a philosophy and science of what concerns us most
nearly, of the history of mankind at large. Everything enforced this
upon my mind; metaphysics and morals, physics and natural history,
and lastly religion above all the rest. Shall he who has ordered
everything in nature, said I to myself, by number, weight, and
measure, who has so regulated according to these the essence of
things, their forms and relations, their course and subsistence,
that only one wisdom, goodness, and power prevail from the system of
the universe to the grain of sand, from the power that supports
worlds and suns to the texture of a spider’s web, who has so
wonderfully and divinely weighed everything in our body, and in the
faculties of our mind, that, when we attempt to reflect on the
only-wise ever so remotely we lose ourselves in an abyss of his
purposes; shall that God depart from his wisdom and goodness in the
general destination and disposition of our species and act in these
without a plan? Or can he have intended to keep us in ignorance of
this while he has displayed to us so much of his eternal purposes in
the inferior part of the creation in which we are much less
concerned? What are the human race upon the whole but a flock
without a shepherd? In the words of the complaining prophet, are
they not left to their own ways, as the fishes of the sea, as the
creeping things that have no ruler over them? Or is it unnecessary
to them to know this plan?"
(von Herder, Johann.
Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (Kindle Locations
181-195). Random Shack.)
Perhaps, as Emily Dickinson noted, "Success is counted sweetest by
those who ne'er succeed." These Germans might have been disgusted by their
own nation's inability to unify and produce a meaningful German history. Or
perhaps it was a reaction, — an antithesis, one might almost say,— against the arrogance of the
philosophes of the mis-labelled 'Enlightenment,' for whom human history was
a sorry tale of ignorance and folly until their noble selves had
appeared on the scene to rescue humanity from its benighted state. Human
history as pointless running to-and-fro is not inspiring.
This longing to find meaning in history would prove fruitful,
producing novel things. The Marxists inherited from Hegel, though they had jettisoned
Hegel's idealism in favor of materialism, a model of the historic
process which posits that a given situation produces its opposite,
which in turn forms an occult and incestuous combination with the
originating element to engender a novel and unexpected offspring.
This paradigm, if it has any religious referent, appears a reversion to the pagan insight that the
world mechanism is sexual! Hegel too had looked for the end of
history, though with his own totalitarian Prussian state as its
culminating apex. The Marxists took Hegel's dialectics in the direction of
materialism, resulting in dialectical materialism, a tissue of
verbiage reminiscent of medieval scholasticism, which at one time,
as recently as the last century held many of the world's thinkers in
thrall. To these 'scientific' thinkers, history is not one darn
thing after another, rather it has almost replaced theology as the
source of ultimate meaning.
How do we handle issues like this today? The
idea that history is a tale told by an idiot, signifying
nothing, has resurfaced in our own day in the researches of popular author
Jared Diamond. In his very popular book, 'Guns, Germs and Steel,' he
raises the question of why some societies march forward in the
direction of technological advance while others, like the
Tasmanians, fall behind, losing even what little technology their
forefathers had. He ominously warns that the only alternative to his own
views is racism, as if no one had ever done history before he took it up.
His is the discovery that the reason why the Spaniards conquered the
Peruvians rather than vice versa is because Eurasia is longer on its
east-west axis than north-south, and that's especially true if we
cheat and add North Africa to Eurasia, which it isn't even. Why is it
understood that the Mediterranean was, not a barrier but a highway,
which indeed it was, but the Gulf of Mexico is an impassible
barrier? And how did the European Spaniards become the designated heirs of the Asians
and North Africans who domesticated wheat, inheriting their 'head
start' which they couldn't have inherited from themselves? The Romans,
when they conquered Spain, used to go for a walk after dinner, like
civilized folk do. They were startled to turn around to see their
native allies running behind, carrying the Romans' baggage and
supplies, hollering 'You forgot this!' The Spanish barbarians could
not imagine why a person would go for a walk, and then return to the
same place; they surmised the Romans must have been breaking camp,
but just forgot to take their stuff. Yet if somehow, by magic,
'Eurasia' can expand to engulf North Africa, then why not have
Western Asia expand to encompass Spain? It's fun to make things up,
when there is no discipline on the process; these 'just-so' stories
come over from Darwinian biology, where there is no discipline
constraining the process either.
The power of geography was noted before and must be acknowledged:
"Had the power which constructed our Earth given its
mountains and seas a different form, had that great destiny which
established the boundaries of nations caused them to originate
elsewhere than from the Asiatic mountains, had the east of Asia
possessed an earlier commerce and a Mediterranean Sea which its
present situation has denied, the whole current of cultivation would
have been altered." (Johann Gotfried von Herder, Outlines of a
Philosophy of the History of Man, Kindle location 7343).
. . .Up to a point. Herder is still doing the history of
sentient: thinking, feeling,— beings. Diamond believes human history hinges on adventitious
factors of no real interest and mostly not under human control, like
that zebras are ill-tempered and bite people. This is why they were
never domesticated, you see. Who knows what the
disposition of the first horses was? There still are a few who don't
like people much, like the horse I was assigned in a group ride
during my childhood. Before Thomas Edison perfected the light bulb,
how many reasons were there why the light bulb absolutely,
positively wouldn't work? There were thousands, all the substances
Edison had tried and discarded. It's a waste of time to give reasons
why technology doesn't work, because there are always a raft of such
reasons, offered up right until the moment when it does work.
Spasms of Luddite thinking have occurred in many societies; in our own,
think of the reaction to nuclear power. The first generation nuclear
reactors had unresolved safety problems, as the third do not; but
they are not going to build any of the third generation. Men like
John Ruskin adopted anti-technology views, but not because they were
racially inferior. He perceived the seamstress hand-sewing a garment
as a creative human being, not a slave, not a cog in a machine. Mohandas Gandhi wanted to see
Indians clad in homespun cotton for this reason, not owing to racial inferiority
on his or John Ruskin's part. To restore history to its place among the humanities, it must be
granted that it has some human meaning or significance, but this
author insists it must have none, lest racism reappear. Looking at
actual history, so long as people steer clear of this author's
Darwinian ideology, racism should not be a problem, because that's
what tends to trigger it.
Some people, like the Tasmanians with fishing, or the Americans with respect to
nuclear power, have abandoned very promising and useful technologies. Why? Has a cultural affinity for Luddite thinking
contributed to this outcome? No, that's racist. But why is it racist? It's like being presented with two possibilities, a.)
either Theodore Kaczynski embarked on his life of crime because
Polish-Americans are racially inferior, or b.) Theodore Kaczynski
embarked on his life of crime because of the weather that day, or
any other imagined and imaginary trivial and insignificant factor. Let's go with c.)
Theodore Kaczynski embarked on his career of crime because he held
Luddite views and imagined taking the path of crime would promote them. Between the
two extremes, of viewing history as a tale told by an idiot, and
making all the meaning in human existence hinge upon history,
mightn't a happy medium be found, which does not rob this field of its real
human significance, nor elevate it into an idol?
Primitive Communism
A likeness between Marxism and certain religious impulses also
appears when we look at the groups which led the way toward valued
and desired practices. An aspiration to communism had come down from
fringe groups of the radical Reformation and earlier like the Taborites. These groups combined a gnostic antinomianism with an interpretation of the book of Acts into a program for
communism and free love. Groups like the Diggers and Ranters
conserved these aspirations down to Marx and Engels' time. The idea
that 'man is God,' which is foundational to Marx and Engels, is
already present in the Kabbalah as part of that movement's gnostic
heritage. Marx's juvenile poetry even shows an enchantment with
Satanism!
While it might seem like Marx's atheism is a startling
innovation, in fact Kabbalistic theology was heading in that
direction for a very long time before him. The Kabbalah, a survival
of gnosticism, splits God into multiple personalities: Spinoza's God is 'ein
sof,' who retains traditional divine attributes such as
self-sufficiency, eternity and immutability. Since very little can
be said about this god and because there is no point in talking to
him, people don't say much to or about him, and thus after one
generation Deists lose any memory of him. But the God of Israel, the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Kabbalists make into a joint project between the only actual
God,— 'ein sof,' the god of the Deists,— and the people,
whose praises inflate this partially man-created god, as if he were
a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, trailing behind Israel,
who are dragging him along. All that remains to be done is to
eliminate the 'partially' and you're an atheist.
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