Historians of religion cannot be content to study critically the symbolic universe of the oppressor" they must also preserve and critically highlight an analysis the mythology of the resistance.
Stefan Arvidsson
Orientation
The need for art, myth, and ritual in socialism
Despite its seemingly secular orientation, literature scholar Terry Eagleton has said that socialism has been a greater reform movement than religion, in fact it has been the greatest reform movement in human history. But in order to achieve these reforms, economic reorganization of society by itself was not enough to move people. There also needed to be socialist culture, artistry, aesthetics, symbolism, rituals, and mythology. However, you would never know it if you looked at socialist practice for most of the 20th century, especially in Germany and in Yankeedom. Stefan Arvidsson says this about the classical description in historical materialism. The description of how different modes of production have emerged and how socialism of necessity will preceed capitalism has something glaringly mythic about which modernist socialists never capitalized on. Karl Kautsky, the socialist Pope of the Second International, went so far as to state that socialism had no ideals to realize, no goals to reach, everything was a secular movement, with no myths and no rituals. Yet all movements, secular or spiritual, need appeal to collective emotions, awaken hope while giving structure to disappointments, sadness and anger. Romantic socialism did this well in the 19th century but why was it so reluctant to claim the same legacy in the 20th century?
Enlightenment and Socialist Criticisms of religion
In his book The Style and Mythology of Socialism: Socialist idealism, 1871-1914, Stefan Arvidsson, names three of the most typical left-wing criticisms of religion:
1) Rational - the claim that religion is false. Religion contradicts the factual description of reality offered by the natural sciences. There is no god in heaven; magic is built on faulty premises and faith healing doesn't work. This was the Enlightenment criticism.
2) Political - priests and the church claim divine authority to control crowds and legitimize the right to their privileges and that of political and economic elites.
This can be seen in Catholicism and Protestant elites in Europe and the United States. It is present in Islamic elites and the Brahminical Hinduism of Modi. It is present among Zionist elites in Israel. This slant also came out of the Enlightenment.
3) Ideological - this is the criticism of Feuerbach and Marx. It affirms that God is the alienated creativity of the masses. What people cannot do on earth, they project onto heaven. It's the promise of a world to come in order to sugarcoat the lack of a prosperous world in this life.
I believe all these criticisms are right. The problem is:
- They are undialectical and do not ask the question of why religion has maintained itself for thousands of years in spite of these criticisms. Surely from a Darwinian point of view, if religion was just irrational, a political trick or an ideological mystification keeping people in mental chains, why didn't natural selection filter it out?
- Religion is held at arm's length. All the methods of religion - myths, rituals, holidays, sacraments, pilgrimages, art, altered states - were hot potatoes, too hot to handle. This unfortunate circumstance has kept socialists in the 20thcentury from learning from and using these spiritual tools in a non-reified, non-superstitious way.
My claim
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