In a comment to my previous post, reader Asher says that Leftism, rather than rejecting the supernatural, locates it in Man himself.
I think this is almost right. But it is subject to an important objection: if Darwinian Man is nothing more than a part and product of Nature, then locating the “supernatural” in Man is to say that Nature itself is supernatural, which is clearly a contradiction in terms. I prefer to say instead that the Leftist cryptoreligion locates the sacred in Nature, and in Man only as a product and integral part of Nature.
Two years ago I wrote this:
The religious impulse, the need for sacred objects, and the hunger for salvation will always find some form of social expression. (This is because what makes religion adaptive in the first place is its effect on group cohesion.)
Religion wants a “skyhook”: something above us upon which we can depend, and with which we can make a kind of contract. In return for our faith, and for a promise of effort and self-sacrifice in the required virtuous forms, we are given protection, or even salvation.
As children, we trust in the protection of our fathers and mothers, and we submit to their authority in return. But even as adults, the world around us is still chaotic and merciless, and to have so many things beyond our control is frightening and stressful. We know that as adults we must make our way somehow in the material world ”” but we are finite, and we know in our bones that the mysterium tremendum is not. Dwarfed by this infinitude, we seek to attach ourselves to something transcendent; salvation in God is our warrant against that great chaos.
When the supernatural basis for all of this is removed — when God dies — we’ve lost our skyhook; the warranty is void. But we are no less overborne by the chaos and mystery we face. We continue to seek the transcendent, but the sky is now empty, and the heavens have lowered. Having sliced off the apex of the sacred pyramid — the unifying presence of God — we are left with a truncated, frustrated hierarchy. God had been the Absolute from which both the natural world, and all human agency, emanated, but now the roots of both Nature and the soul of Man are exposed and disconnected.
We have not, however, lost our sense of awe, and of transcendent beauty and mystery, when we contemplate the natural world — and so in our new, sawed-off religion, we preserve Nature as a sacred object. (Indeed, with God now departed, many of us now promote Nature to fill his place.) And having lost God as the agent and guarantor of our protection and salvation, we must set our sights, and pin our hopes, upon the only thing we can still discern above us: the State.
Once we have put Nature in the place of God, then Darwinian Man, being at the same time a creation of Nature and a coequal part of Nature, becomes sacred as well — a devalued version of the notion of Man being the “image of God” (we should note as well that this can be seen as a stunted analogue of the Trinity). In this way, evolution becomes a spiritual involution: the towering ladder of Being, that once reached all the way to Heaven, is reduced to a single rung.
See also, for example, this. I have so many posts touching on all of this from various angles that I really should gather them all and distill them into a single essay. The gist, though, is this: When God is removed from the cosmic hierarchy, the sacred necessarily becomes earthly. (Where else can it go?)
Another point to keep in mind is that, because the lowering of Heaven to Earth is a flattening of a gradient that, historically, has always served as a mighty source of energy, the change can also be understood in terms of entropy:
It’s a mechanical, entropic process, like water finding every crack and fissure as it seeks the lowest level.
It is entropic precisely in the sense that it levels and flattens everything, as order yields to disorder. In particular, it levels the gradients that are necessary, in any thermodynamic system, for the possibility of useful work. Ultimately, everything will be undifferentiated from everything else. (Is that not the obvious endpoint of our secular religion’s pathological mission?) It is this flattening, correctly understood as a thermodynamic exhaustion, that is why Leftism always reduces societies to economic and cultural rubble.
Astrophysicists speak of the “heat death of the Universe’” This is perfectly analogous: it is the heat death of our civilization.
From the same post:
The action of the Left is always to reduce potential; it leaves everything it touches in a lower-energy state. It breaks mountains into scree; it dismantles cathedrals to build hovels.
16 Comments
Malcolm, you say:
“: if Darwinian Man is nothing more than a part and product of Nature, then locating the “supernatural” in Man is to say that Nature itself is supernatural, which is clearly a contradiction in terms. ”
I don’t believe the Left does this and I have had a fair number of leftists specifically reject the notion of locating the supernatural in the natural. The Leftist vision is that man, through force of pure will, has (or is in the process of) completely transcended the natural realm. When forced to explicitly confront this implied notion they tend to back off a bit and claim that man is *in the process* of completely transcending nature.
I have had a fair number of leftists explicitly tell me that “we have transcended nature”. My take is that, for leftists, man is a wholly supernatural being who has transcended nature. If you go back and read Lenin and, especially, Trotsky they were clearly peddling a vision of man absolutely transcending nature. We laugh at Lysenko, but he was simply taking the logic of absolute human transcendence to its logical conclusion.
What is almost unknown about Marx was that his initial dream was to be a romantic poet in the genre known as “magical idealism”. A very obscure philosopher named Leonard Wessell wrote two of the most underrated books ever written about Marx on this particular aspect of his life. Wessell makes an excellent case that Marx’s entire philosophical writings were simply an attempt to make magical idealism into a scientistic system. To quote Marx: in an age of science all myths must be made scientific. if you take that at face value Marx is admitting that he is just putting a scientific faÁ§ade on a creation mythos.
Asher,
This “Leftist vision” is just sophistic sleight-of-hand, and an equivocation on the term “Nature”.
In the secular religion of the modern, liberal West, nothing stands outside the material world, the space-time system we can describe with our physical sciences. Darwinian Man, however advanced, is clearly a product of, and remains embedded in, that system.
In the sense that the people you describe use the idea of “transcending Nature”, they simply mean that Man has broken the bounds of instinct, and of evolutionary programming, and that by his social and physical science he has learned new ways of bending Nature, and by extension Man himself, to his will.
But all that this means is that Man, as the cleverest thing in Nature, has battled his way to the throne. He is still as imprisoned in the natural world as he ever was; all that has changed is his relative status, and the range of his liberty, therein.
After all: how can Man transcend Nature if the natural world is all that there is? And if the natural world isn’t all that there is — if there is a transcendent realm into which Man can lift himself — then on what basis can we assume that it was unoccupied until Man came along?
“After all: how can Man transcend Nature if the natural world is all that there is? And if the natural world isn’t all that there is – if there is a transcendent realm into which Man can lift himself – then on what basis can we assume that it was unoccupied until Man came along?”
It didn’t exist prior to man coming along, it is a creation of man, man creates transcendence by pure force of will. I have had several atheists tell me they believe in free will. There is no rational analysis going on there, it’s a product of pure desire. My take is that when leftists say that there is nothing beyond the natural realm they are just being intellectually dishonest (at least the vast majority).
I remember reading about stone age shaman telling their tribal warriors that there was a sacred mud pit whose mud would stop bullets. Mud is just, well, mud. It’s completely natural. Those tribal warriors surely had prior experience with mud as a natural phenomena, yet, they managed to be convinced that there was this special mud that would stop bullets.
I don’t see much difference between the belief in bullet stopping mud and much of what leftists hold.
I think our differences may be that I definitely believe in God, the supernatural, while you seem not to believe in such. If some people can believe that there is some sky man (a gross caricature) then I don’t see that it’s a stretch for other people to believe that they are that sky man.
Asher,
Very little of human life is based on rational analysis, so we shouldn’t be surprised if this is so.
Well, I can’t rule it out, either, as I once thought I could. I’m curious to see where I end up.
I agree with your deduction but am not sufficiently satisfied with your conclusion. After all, with the displacement of God and elevating man, there is still the totalitarian lust that the Left has in controlling man’s nature.
Hence, I have personally defined Leftism as self-deifying anti-humanism. There is the sense of man having become the Absolute, and is quasi-Gnostic per Eric Voegelin’s treatment of Modern man. Yet there is also the schizophrenic mistrust in his power. It is with this mistrust which is where I would not agree in a full sanctification of Nature, and find the lust toward enslaving others to Leftism’s will-to-power as the dredges of a vulgarian Christian morality which poses man’s eternal damnation.
And I’m sure you can appreciate the decay of the Protestant “elect” into this self-deification, of those in possession of the metaphorical state of grace by acting absurdly vainly at war with The Good, i.e. demonizing what is natural, and blindly religiously convinced of their power to save the world.
“Hence, I have personally defined Leftism as self-deifying anti-humanism. There is the sense of man having become the Absolute”
There’s a passage from Trotsky where he is pretty explicit that fully realized communism would require the complete elimination of humanity as it exists, that the current crop of humanity is incapable and unworthy of his envisioned future. The left hates the world as it is, and loves the world it thinks *should be*. Malcolm I would suggest that you are underestimating the pride and arrogance of the left. No one could be that prideful, right? Oh, but they really are that prideful.
The left fully intends to ascend to the hill of the north, to become like the Most High God.
“self-deifying anti-humanism”
There are passages in marx that can very plausibly be read so that marx doesn’t think that actually existing homo sapiens are actually human. So, actual humans, humanity, are/is something that communism will create and that current homo sapiens are a false humanity.
Asher,
As someone who came to social and political awareness in the 1960s, was marinated in that era’s Utopian fervor, and who, after a road-to-Damascus awakening in middle age, has spent the past decades inquiring into the historical, social, and philosophical causes of our great cultural catastrophe, you won’t find anyone less likely than me to underestimate the “pride and arrogance of the left”.
Even a glance at the history of leftism makes clear that its idee fixe is the perfectablitly of Man. The aim of an earthly Utopia brought about by the re-education and transformation of mankind has always been its polestar.
This is indeed the fundamental distinction: the traditionalist looks at Man as given, sees that he is “crooked timber”, and understands that this imposes constraints upon what can reasonably be built. For this reason he knows that the organic and traditional cultures that have arisen over millennia of sanguinary trial contain empirical wisdom — implicit wisdom — the explication of which vastly exceeds the capacity of even the most superior individual.
The man of the Left imagines his Utopia, then builds his Procrustean bed for Mankind. Those who cannot, or will not, allow themselves to be suitably modified — a project that the traditionalist knows, with the timeless truth of Man, and the book of history, as his teachers, to be impossible — must be moved out of the way, or destroyed.
(I wrote a little summary of these conflicting attitudes a while back, here.)
The idea of the sublunary Ubermensch, in various forms, has a persistent appeal to secularists of every stripe. Its latest, techno-futurist form is “transhumanism”.
The distinction I’ve made here persists, however: all of these naturalistic visions differ in kind from the idea of a hierarchy of Being whose apex is God, and in which Man, however transformed by technical or political improvement, stands in relation to God as unity to infinity. To conflate them is a qualitative and categorical error.
I guess we have a very different understanding what “God” means. My definition is that it is simply any entity unconstrained by cause and effect. A “religion” is a belief in a such an entity, regardless of whether or not that entity actually exists. I don’t see how a hierarchy of being is an integral component to a notion of God.
The other issue I take is the distinction between unity and infinity. True unity and infinity are co-synonymous. A unity that isn’t infinite is a false unity.
I’m not saying you’re wrong and I’m right, but we have significantly different understandings of some of these concepts.
An excellent discussion all! I have enjoyed following along.
Asher,
In the historical context of the replacement of Western religion by a secular cryptoreligion, I refer to God as understood in the Western, Christian tradition. In that context, the quality of absolute freedom that you ascribe to God is necessary, but it is not sufficient. In addition to original agency, the God of the Christian West is also an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, eternal Being who stands outside time and space, and is the uncreated Creator of the natural Universe of which time and space are the substrate and framework.
As for unity and infinity: we could digress at length about Cantorian degrees of infinity. (Unity, for example, is finite and integral in the infinite number series, while at the same time it contains an infinitude of rational parts — an infinitude of the same cardinality as the number series itself. Meanwhile, that unity also contains a higher-order infinity of real numbers. Etc.)
It would have been clearer, and simpler, for me to have said “Man, however transformed by technical or political improvement, stands in relation to God as the finite does to the infinite.” That is the hierarchy (and indeed, the word “hierarchy”, in its origin, refers to precisely this relation!) I was trying to describe.
Malcolm,
A) the quality of absolute freedom that you ascribe to God is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
B) an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, eternal Being who stands outside time and space, and is the uncreated Creator
I suspected this distinction was the source of our differences in our understanding. I have been saying for many, many years that these two statements are different ways of saying the exact same proposition. An entity that is unconstrained by cause and effect is identical to one that stands outside of space and time. At least that’s what I have been telling people for years. I am open to arguments that they are distinct things but have, to these point, held that they are co-synonymous.
To tweak your elegant formulation, unconstrained by cause and effect is a sufficent condition for Godhood.
Asher,
Well, if I accept your point arguendo, then a hierarchy that terminates in Man, however enhanced and augmented by leftist improvements, is qualitatively different from one that terminates in God — unless, that is, secular Progressivism actually has a program in place to launch a mob of living, hairless apes into some Elysian realm that is actually beyond space and time. (And if Chuck Schumer, George Soros, and Jeremy Corbin have that up their sleeves, I’m all ears.)
…so perhaps we are in broad agreement here.
Malcolm,
“unless, that is, secular Progressivism actually has a program in place to launch a mob of living, hairless apes into some Elysian realm that is actually beyond space and time.”
Deep down they really think they do have this ability. it’s madness but that’s what they believe.