Selections: Religion, Globalization, and Revolution

The resemblance of Communism to religion , as an ideology more believed than understood, has often been noted, as a theme close to being played out. As J. L. Talmon notes, discussing St. Simon, in Romanticism and Revolt, Europe: 1815-1848, “The crying need of the new industrial age was for a new religion…Saint Simon called this new religion of his ‘Nouveau Christianisme’.[i] In fact, the crying need was for some labor movement to organize ‘class struggle’ as a world historical first, a process soon underway, and one divorced from ‘religion’ from the first, given the viewpoint of a capitalist ‘captain of industry’ like Saint Simon. Beside its utopian cast and economic focus, communism had many of the hallmarks of a novel religious movement of social integration. It is not hard to find the source of spring water in the world of the post-Hegelians.

Many will protest understandably the use thus of the term ‘religion’, in vain, if the historical exemplars are listed to view, as candidates for the term’s ‘real’ meaning, starting with the era of the Qumranic period. This early socialist snapshot, before the labels were changed, evokes the technocratic ideological fervor of ‘religious’ Communism, however ‘unsacred’ the result. Communism in many ways reopened the fanaticism of the Thirty Years War with its confusing ‘conservative’ futurism as a materialist ‘catholicism’ so reminiscent of its Persian ghost and first incarnation in the wake of the Assyrians, and Tiglath Pilesers, in the times of the severally one Isaiah. These are not idle speculations. The Romans denounced and wrote off the Christians for three centuries, in vain.

The critique of leftist ideology as ‘religious messianism’ will backfire in our more general approach. It is religious messianism indeed, cut from whole cloth. The Zoroastrian element is correctly in place. Engels, stalwart son of the fertile Pietist movement that has spawned figures such as Kant, and Marx the descendant of rabbis. Since we are passing beyond the distinction of sacred and secular ages, find Zarathustra correctly reflecting on the end state of a cyclical system in the dialectic of good and evil, and will find ‘religions’ a relationship between transitions and the oikoumenes they generate, the use of the term ‘religion’ will prove beside the point. The modern age closes the triangle on religions of soul and divinity with the new modern completion as, at least in Kantian terms building from Rousseau, the noumenal dark night of the ‘I’, the autonomous individual and his freedom. This point should not be misunderstood. It is the transformation near the divide, not the early transition that proves significant in both the Judaic and Protestant cases.[ii]

The Communist catastrophe would not seem to have anything to do with religion. The comparison is useful, up to a point. A close look at the era of Hegel and the Left/Right Hegelians shows us the direct connection to the Protestant Reformation, the ‘eonic New Age’, and the tide of Biblical Criticism . And we also see the collision, so reminiscent of Indian religious history, in the hoary clash of materialism and idealism. The only religion that interests the modernist would be the economic question, and a Darwinian, not even a Smithian, ethic for his daily prayer. The built-in Athens-Jerusalem recursion of the far left targets that with a vengeance, but ends with a value-free social science wrapped in prophetic moral wrath. In any case, if Communism isn’t much of a religion, the candidate left is market ideology, so we are back in the British museum, studying the blue papers. This use of the term ‘religion’ might be preliminary to discontinued usage of the term. Our system does not honor the categories we bring to it, and we will soon be in pursuit of a new ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’.

It was Nietzsche who pointed to the revolutionary manqué in Luther (along with the proto-liberal), as the aborted process of religious renewal ends in the slaughter of the quite Zoroastrian Münzer. A true religionist means business, and Marx was a recurrence of the type. At one and the same time, religion is in danger of becoming superfluous category, and the Marxist reinvention of the category egregiously off the mark. The resemblance, however, to the original Athens/Jerusalem dynamic is uncanny, save that this is built into a cultural dialectic rather than a geographical division. This is not even a Leftist sentiment, but an attempt to grasp the sheer scale of the Bolshevik catastrophe in its ‘theocratic’ hallucination.

Having made this comparison with religion, we will not pursue the point, since the collation of categories serves no real purpose. But we have forgotten that (Axial) ‘religion’ is as much a dynamic of globalization, as a metaphysical belief system. This is the reason for the resemblance of isomorphic permutations of the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’. The first form of monotheism as ‘religion’ was the Persian Universal Empire with its ecumenical ‘Zoroastrian’ ideology, as the universal empire seen first with the Akkadians, thence to the Assyrians, was humanized as the birth of ‘Islam’, in the age of the Hebrew prophet s. The subtler Judaic stream transformed this theme of empire, or at least tried. This concordance, we will see, is more than coincidence. But then what in fact does the term, ‘religion ’ mean? The term is perhaps beyond rescue. It is completely misleading, in the kaleidoscope of look-alikes, and savage ‘re-formations’ wishing to be Reformations. A more fruitful perspective is the eonic view, which focuses on the turning point factor behind ‘religion’ with its clustering of ecumenical extensions to the forms of the state and sourcing precisely from our pattern of eonic generations. We can see the issue of totalitarian origins is bound intrinsically, if only by definition, with the historical trend of the rise of the state itself. Indeed, the first great state in history, the

Egypt

ian, was a totalitarian theocracy.

The last twist on the idea of the eonic evolution of religion is the idea of utopia. The utopia n idea is now apparently discredited, judging from the sermons preached against it, the object of ridicule, its mere mention grounds for conservative denunciation. It is baffling indeed that champions of the social order don’t apply this critique to ideas of redemptive salvation in the utopian great religions. The utopia n idea, as a primitive attempt at social modeling, is not as such responsible for totalitarian troubles, was denounced by Marx, and appeared in concert, almost to the decade, with all the advances of modern emergence, and leaves a question mark about the future if its significance is exhausted. If utopian thinking is so evil, why is Machiavellian thinking thought so benign? In the age of mass communication television this organized mendacity daily visible and inescapable is a new phenomenon, the constant environment of political lies, curdling the brains of helpless viewers at the climax of technological advance. The Machiavellian moment is at hand.

But then our tale of modernity starts with this symmetry and eonic riddle in the generation of Luther. The wheel of fire turns, between Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Thomas More’s Utopia, the one at earliest modern dawn in the world of the Renaissance , the other as if the first hint of the new period of change getting under way after 1500, with Martin Luther, and the forgotten world of Thomas Münzer, social revolution , and the economic rise of modernity. It is interesting that the generation between the two clocks the onset of the modern transformation, and the difference in tone is significant. Because politicians are ‘realists’, if not failures, Machiavelli is taken as scientific, and moral interpretation of change as utopian . The abolition of slavery, and the struggle for Freedom were once utopian. Perhaps the postmodern ist age will renounce Machiavelli, as the first modernist. How will we classify ‘utopianism’? A futurist action script! The timing, as we will see, is eerily perfect.[iii]

[i]Romanticism and Revolt, Europe: 1815-1848 (1967), J. L. Talmon, p. 63. James Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), J. L. Talmon’s Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (1960), and others, cf. Bernard Tuck’s The Longing for Total Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

[ii] As Bernard Yack notes in The Longing For Total Revolution, where he critiques the charge of ‘religion’ laid against the detested ‘revolutionary faith’, “[Kant’s] dichotomy between human freedom and natural necessity…forms the conceptual foundation upon which all of the most influential nineteenth century German moral philosophers and social critics, even those like Marx and Nietzsche who explicitly reject it, erect their positions.” Bernard Tuck’s The Longing for Total Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p.22.

[iii] For a history of utopian thinking, cf. Frank & Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1979), Melvin Laski, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976), Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times/i> (New York: Blackwell, 1987)