The Dialectical King

06 May 2015

Martin Luther King, Jr., offers us the rare example of a man who, perhaps more than any other person of his generation, grasped its Spirit, who so inwardly felt its needs and longings and future. He offers us the equally rare example of a figure who is, like Adam Smith, praised but never read, memorialized but never remembered, transfigured into a prophet whose tomb is built and decorated by political “pharisees” and “teachers of the law” of every sort, who praise a man who never never existed (Matthew 23:29-30). And if we should hope to avoid being kind of the hypocrites against whom Jesus Christ inveighed, we would do well to remember Dr. King for the man he actually was, attending to the details of his thought as he himself expressed it. Toward this end, it of particular importance to develop an understanding of what might be called the broad conceptual economy of King’s thought — to grasp not only the main themes, concepts, and ideas of King’s thought, but also, perhaps more importantly, to grasp their inner relations, which are not reducible to the sum of their constituent parts. Here I would offer that every major aspect of King’s thought is fundamentally informed by Hegelian dialectics and cannot therefore be fully understood or appreciated without it.

The Criticism of Heaven: Idealism, Materialism, and the Dialectic of God

12 May 2015

Introduction.

Our subject is the Absolute, or God, our contention, that God reveals Godself (at least in part) through communism of the sort that Marx envisioned, that this follows from a proper understanding of the relation of Hegel’s philosophy and Marx’s, a relation which has been in my view misunderstood, oversimplified to the point of caricature. This owes in some part to Marx’s own misreading of Hegel and, in consequence of this, his own misunderstanding of the relation of his philosophy to Hegel’s. But the nature of this misreading is complex, and, as we will see in the course of this argument, it puts Marx’s philosophy into a somewhat ambiguous relation with regard to Hegel’s. On the one hand, it enabled Marx, following Feuerbach, to elaborate the anthropological implications which were implied in but never thoroughly elaborated in Hegel’s absolute idealism, i.e., his identification of the divine and human nature. On the other hand, Marx’s misreading of Hegel prevented him from recognizing his own materialist philosophy as an expression of the Absolute, conceiving his philosophy instead rather falsely in opposition to Hegel’s.

Crucifixion, Resurrection, Revolution

28 December 2014

In her essay, “The American Dream and the Economic Myth,” Betty Sue Flowers stresses the importance of myth in the life of a society.^[1] “The power of stories to shape our reality,” she writes, “is seldom acknowledged. Most of us simply don’t understand the extent to which we’re always embedded in a story. We’re … storytelling animals. We even dream in stories.”  The reason that myths prove so powerful in shaping our lives is that they imbue mere facts with deeper meaning.  As a species, we are not so much thinking beings as we are living beings, and facts alone mean little divorced from the narrative dimension in which we live. “Each of our lives,” Flowers writes, “is a collection of historical events and facts which we can do nothing to change. But these facts are embedded in the story we tell about ourselves. And the future is shaped not by the mere facts, but by this story …”^[2]  This, I think, is part of the reason why our religious traditions are so vital to our collective existence.  They are libraries of myths.  They provide the structures of meaning in which we enact our most deeply held values and beliefs.  At least in the United States, the most influential religious tradition is Christianity, with its thematic emphasis on the narrative of crucifixion and resurrection.  For many Christians, this narrative has a distinct meaning, largely dependent on their particular tradition.  But narrative themes are not exhausted in one interpretation, and so long as other interpretations are not incompatible, myths are polyvalent, and have many meanings.  In the following essay, I attempt to draw out one of these meanings from the Christian narrative of crucifixion and resurrection in order to show the manner in which this mythological narrative can help us to reconceptualize our economic future.  The need for myths of this sort is, I think, all the more necessary given the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. People are searching for alternatives.  The story they have been told is not squaring with the reality they have experienced, and they are searching for other stories to tell.

On Galbraith’s Affluent Society

13 January 2015

It has been nearly sixty years since John Kenneth Galbraith, the famed public intellectual, Harvard economist, diplomat, and author penned The Affluent Society.  His most influential book, it was an expression of the man behind it and a distillation of the world and of the times in which he lived. Molded by the experiences of the Great Depression and World War II, Galbraith was a passionate and unapologetic liberal, a restless and prolific defender of its basic values: liberty, equality, and freedom.  As a liberal, he was one of the last in the tradition of political economy inaugurated by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, a way of thinking about the world which did not prize itself on the mathematical formalism so characteristic of contemporary economics, but focused instead on the complex interactions of firms, the market, and the state.  Today there are few prominent political economists, and none as prominent or as sharp as Galbraith.  Political economists like Robert Heilbroner and Robert Reich fall into the tradition after Galbraith, and they owe their debt to him.  Living and writing in the period in which the obsession mathematical formalism came to prominence in professional economics, Galbraith stood for a tradition which sought explanations not in numbers alone, but in the complex interactions of economic actors, institutions, society, and nature. It found evidence not in the mist-enveloped regions of mathematical theory, but in the unaccommodating circumstances of concrete history.  Against the narrow, insular, and reductionist tendencies of professional economics, Galbraith’s political economy stood for a manner of thinking which remained holistic and practical.  It abandoned the conceit that economic life is an autonomous phenomenon, and saw it instead as inextricably bound up with the greater life of society, not least with politics. As a political economist, Galbraith, like Keynes before him and Reich after him, had an eye for aggregates, for sifting through and sorting through the manifold factors and trends and patterns of economic life to find a few basic principles which could describe its general motion, for penetrating through a maddening sea of variables to see the laws which govern them.  Like a true scientist, he had an uncanny ability to sit with huge magnitudes of complex and unintelligible data, and distill from them a few key aggregates.   These aptitudes and tendencies may have had something to do with the fact that Galbraith was, above all, a practical political economist.  He had to be.  Like Reich, who was the Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration, Galbraith, as a public official in the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations, did not have the dual luxuries of error and irrelevance enjoyed by other economists.  It was practical necessity which informed Galbraith’s work and dictated his thinking.  It was practical necessity which lent it its distinctively historicist character.  As a practical political economist, Galbraith’s work was not only an expression of the direct historical circumstances in which he lived, but also a response to the unique problems which it posed.

For Socialism

11 March 2014

In May 1949, Monthly Review, the leading socialist journal, published an article in its inaugural issue entitled “Why Socialism?” written by a leading intellectual who went on in this article to write, “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate” what he called the “grave evils” of capitalism, “namely through the establishment of a socialist economy.”^[1]  His name was Albert Einstein.  He was a socialist, indeed but one among a host of those today we consider to be hopelessly quixotic and starry-eyed, among them people like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, the Dalai Lama, George Orwell, even Martin Luther King, who suggested, like Einstein, a sentiment which should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for about two seconds, namely that “something is wrong with capitalism,” and that “America must move toward a democratic socialism.” 

Heschel and the Problem of Modernity

12 December 2014

Among the most salient facts of modern existence is what is sometimes called the death of god, the experience of godlessness, the feeling that things somehow no longer hang together in a way they used to, nihilism, the absence of meaning in a world in which all value is reduced to an exchange relation expressed in price.^[1]  It is not an isolated fact of modern life, but makes itself felt everywhere, a cold chill in the bones, a real if vague sense of the vanity and emptiness of so much that characterizes modern existence, with its cars and bombs and manufactured happiness, with its brutal racism and sexism and capitalism.  For a poet like T.S. Eliot, the modern world is a kind of wasteland, a moral and spiritual dump where truth, rationality and meaning rot away in their squalid quarters, decaying amid the amnesiac waste.  The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has compared reality in this world to “a few shreds still discernable in the deserts … rotting like a carcass.”^[2]  The context here is European, and it would be erroneous to treat all nihilisms as if they were one thing, but there is at least an element of truth in this conception which generalizes more broadly.  If the spiritual landscape of late modernity is best described by a wasteland, its inhabitants are perhaps best described as amnesiacs, hopeless and weary, sleep-walking amid the dismal slums of meaning, stalking with a mild torpor amid the decaying heaps of what was once good and true and beautiful, not real living human beings but shadows, casting about the graveyard of meaning with numbed senses and half-dimmed vision, furtively lurking, in whisper and in shadow, unseeing, unfeeling, with self-induced somnambulence, amid the tombs of value and its empty sepulchres. 

What Gods We Worship

We live in an age which, more and more, disclaims its religiosity, which with ever increasing zeal, distances itself from religion.  This anti-religious geist, if we might call it that, is theoretically articulated in what is called secularization theory, according to which society has transitioned, or is in the process of transitioning, from one based on religious beliefs, practices, and institutions to one which is based instead on secular equivalents — a process carried swiftly along, so it is maintained, by modernization and rationalization.  Today this theory has taken on a particular militancy by a group of intellectuals referred to as the ‘New Atheists,’ which includes such bright figures as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, A.C. Grayling, and the late Christopher Hitchens, who are perhaps more accurately described by the term “pop-secularists.”  I should note that the terms I use in describing this group are not my own.  They are self-ascribed.  Dennett, for example, has been very generous in his admiration of a group (of which he is a member) called ‘The Brights,’ whose salutary purpose, according to its website, is to protest the marginalization of “[p]ersons who have a naturalistic worldview.”^[2]  (The Brights place Dennett first on their list of “Enthusiastic Brights.”^[3])  And Dawkins, the most popular of these rationalists, very candidly identifies his position as “militant atheism.”^[4]  It goes quite without saying that the secularization theory to which these men militantly subscribe poses a great challenge to my project, for if society is religionless, then a project like this which criticizes actually-existing religion has nothing to criticize.  According to the New Atheists, religion is a kind of disease which inhibits humanity from Enlightenment and it — humanity — can only be redeemed by Science and Reason, a service, to be sure, rendered munificently unto it by none other than themselves.  The late Christopher Hitchens, for instance, has suggested that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” and has assured us that we can “consciously look forward to the further evolution of our poor brains, and to stupendous advances in medicine and life extension.”^[5]  This view, in perhaps more erudite jargon, is known as Victorian Rationalism,^[6] which makes the ‘New’ in ‘New Atheism,’ seem rather a tenuous assertion.  But to the point, if the New Atheists are correct, then my project is quite pointless.  For if science indeed has displaced religion, then I have no subject matter with which to work.  Fortunately, one has substantial reason to believe they are wrong.  Religion thrives today.  In fact, it is so pervasive that these very men unconsciously participate in it.  As I shall argue, we are anything but secular, and we are hardly less religious than we were, say, one hundred and fifty years ago when Marx proclaimed, correctly, that “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism”^[7] — correct because precisely the form which ideology takes today is the form of religion.

A Critique of Economic Theology

21 October 2014

“Our scientific political economy has long been an oracle of the false god.  It has taught us to approach economic questions from the point of view of goods and not of man.” — Walter Rauschenbusch^[1]

False Prophets: A Critique of Modern Economics

10 May 2014

There was much furor lately, especially among Christians at Harvard, about a satanic Black Mass on the campus.^[1]  As a writer for the Ichthus, I was sent an email inviting me to sign a petition which asserted that this Black Mass “mocks religious beliefs, desecrates sacred items and symbols, and insults the spiritual sensitivities of Harvard’s Catholics, Christians, and other people of faith. This form of satanic worship not only ridicules the central practice of Catholicism, the Mass, but it also mocks and offends all who have faith in Christ,” and it goes on to say that the Christians at Harvard “are offended and outraged this event has been permitted to take place at Harvard.”  Though in the end the Black Mass was moved off campus and performed in, of all places, a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square, it is quite understandable why many Christians were, if not enraged, at least very disconcerted about it. 

A Contribution to a Critique of Unger’s Philosophy of Left

28 April 2014

One of the great historical ironies of philosophy is the way in which Marx views himself in relation to Hegel.  As he says in one of his prefaces to Capital, “My dialectic is not only different from the Hegelian, but it its direct opposite … With him it is standing on its head.  It must be turned right side up again …”^[1]  But as so many have recognized, Marx is a good deal more compatible with Hegel than he seems to think, and Hegel is a good deal more compatible with Marx than Marx himself would allow for.  In a similar way, there is a kind of irony in the fact that despite its rejection of “necessitarian” classical social theory like Marxism, Roberto Unger’s admittedly prophetic and visionary theory of false necessity is not only more compatible with Marxism than it seems to admit, but in some respects also a good deal more necessitarian than it too.  In the essay which follows, I argue that, despite its laudatory advantages, anti-necessitarian false necessity often misreads its own necessitarianism into classical social theory, exemplified by Marxism — as a result of which it is unable to appreciate, flawed as it is, classical social theory’s rich, possibly transformative insights, especially regarding private property, class, and the market.  In disregarding these insights, false necessity often makes, in different forms, the same kinds of intellectual errors and theoretical mistakes it criticizes progressive liberalism of, especially, in its attempt to balance the interests of capital and labour, the error of addressing the topical symptoms of a social reality while failing to adequately address its deeper causes.  In this error, in turn, false necessity often repeats the same mistakes of the necessitarian theory, namely in its own species of prescriptivism.