Do Your Part to Save the Scene: Reflections on Marxism as a Secular Religion

[© tweed]

Picking A Belief System and Sticking to It (Do Your Part to Save the Scene)
Reflections on Marxism as a Secular Religion


I was born and raised without a concrete religious identity.  my lapsed Catholic mother exposed me to the softest edge of liberal organized religion, Unitarian Universalism, for a few years.  it did not fill the gap, and it must not have been working for her, either, as we stopped going as suddenly as we had started.

as such, on an emotional-existential level, I was on my own.  this is not a unique phenomenon in the 21st Century: tens, or even hundreds of millions, of Western adolescents in the past few decades have been raised without religion.  but, I will claim, my situation is uniquely dire.  I cannot prove it, but I fashion myself as being on the outer-edge of self-awareness: I believe that my knowledge of myself, my feelings, and my impotence to create and alter the situations that define me, put me in the 99th percentile of the Self-Awareness Category, however defined. 

this, combined with the lack of an institutional, organized religious framework to appeal to in times of existential want, has at times produced a stilting anomie.  in my moments and phases of greater resentment, it's driven me to a dark and despairing nihilism.  it may work for some people, and more power to them, but nihilism failed me: it led to a constant treading of the fine line between self-pity and self-loathing, a fetishization of self-destruction and chronic inaction.  this is not a space which I wish to spend any more of my time.

so, where to go?  as I wrote in 2010 on a topic that anticpated this one, "we all crave our dramas, and they all require faith; what gives?"  an influential thinker on my experience in this realm is David Sprintzen, a political activist on my native Long Island and retired Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Long Island University - C.W. Post.  his latest work, Critique of Western Philosophy and Social Theory, tackles part of this problem: as he puts it, "the existential drama at the heart of the modern world."  he argues that Western-driven modernity (or postmodernity, if you prefer) has been unable to reconcile the catastrophic effects of the falsification of Christianity... leading to, if we are to quote the well-executed 1999 film Fight Club, "We are the middle children of history, man.  No purpose or place.  Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives."

Goddamnit, I do not want to be a middle child of history!  my mind is simply too big, my heart beats too loudly, for me to willingly submit to a one-way trip into the Abyss.  I need something to convince me against all odds that this need not be the case.  that there is a coherent, internally consistent, explanatory system that will place me at given coordinates, sympathize, and hand me a tool-kit to fight back against both existential and consumerist nihilism.  and, I am proud to tell you, I've found it!  I've found it, and it's called Marxism.

[Redalgo]

Personally, I prefer secular personism. There are a few similarities in our experiences but in the end I decided that Marx was a flawed, biased product of his times like all the rest of us and that, although his contributions to the social sciences were great, a lot of his ideas now seem archaic. Grats though on finding a purpose, or higher calling of sorts to fill that gap of what was missing!

[Grumpier Than Thou]

Fall Out Boy reference in the title?

[fezzyfestoon]

I too have always felt extremely self-aware. Almost to a fault in my case. I created a dizzying world that made it impossible to tell who I wanted to be, who I thought I was, and who I really was. The more I thought about it and the deeper I tried to understand myself and cultivate that, the more mentally cracked out I became. I came to conclusion that it's impossible to tell who you are at any particular moment and even if you come close, you become to mentally active about it. Being too aware and in control of who you are makes you lose control in a sense. At least that's what happened to me. Yes, I am still very conscious of who I am, but I don't try to choose who I am. The second you start defining yourself is the second you cease being yourself. If you believe yourself to fit snugly into a particular personality or style or ideology, you lose what got you there in the first place. Nobody can sit down in front of the proverbial mirror and list traits they definitively are and are not at all times. We are constantly changing as people and so are the categories we find ourselves in. The more we try to pin ourselves down and dedicate our personalities and mental activity to consistency with a fabricated existence the less likely we are to make something of ourselves as a whole. I think we ought to stop trying so damn hard to be something that already exists and just let ourselves fall into our historical place naturally. If not, we won't be hailed as being an innovative, powerful generation of thinkers. We'll be remembered as contrived, unoriginal, and essentially a pointless generation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bit passé to use Marxism as a substitute for religion, don't you think? Or is that the point?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

"John Clellon Holmes ... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said, 'You know, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!'"

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Bit passé to use Marxism as a substitute for religion, don't you think? Or is that the point?

It's certainly a rather old school of Marxism, but what I'm wondering about is what happened to Tweed's interest in the Mormon tradition.