On the Paralysis of the Left Today
Walter A. Davis

This brief essay is written to celebrate the first anniversary of MWC News with an offering dedicated to our common struggle to free ourselves from the ideologies that blind us to the imperatives of our historical situation.

Thanks to the success of the fundamentalist religious right, a dichotomy now haunts the left. Should we continue to ground leftist thought in scientific rationality or must we reclaim a prominent place for religion (or “the spiritual”) in our thought and politics?  What I want to suggest here is that this dichotomy—or what Zizek would call a “forced choice”—is itself a prime instance of how ideology paralyzes us by preventing us from constituting the position that is valuable precisely because it transcends both options. As long as we think of scientistic rationality and religion as the laternatives that exhaust the possibilities we have no way to constitute the position that supplants or negates both in a way that reveals—both for critical understanding and for praxis—all that they exclude.  (I’ve written a series of books dedicated to the construction of this position, but will say no more of it here.  My sole purpose on this occasion is to picture our paralysis.)     

The Scientistic Ideology

In recent years scientism has dominated leftist self-consciousness.  The Cartesian rationality of a Chomsky, the Darwinian ontology of a Dennett provide for many leftists the only solid theoretical foundation; one that has the added virtue of liberation from religion.  We are the party of reason.  Our conceptual paradigm must today derive accordingly from Darwinian neuro-science as articulated in its broadest philosophic implications by Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker and as applied to our current political-religious situation by Sam Harris.  As Dennett teaches, evolution provides the master code for explaining everything about Life.  Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, to cite the title of Dennettt’s finest book, is that purposeful behavior emerges from a senseless mechanical process.  Ontologically that process is all there is.  And thus the correct explanation of any phenomenon traces it back to the conditions of that origin.  What we call “intentional behavior,”  for example, is no more than natural adaptation to a situation that by selection pressure favored the development of that behavior. Over time totally naturalistic processes thus give birth to the illusion of consciousness as a separate realm defined by an “inner theatre” full of deliberative and even Hamlet-like complications.  But for Dennett, “consciousness explained” is consciousness revealed as nothing but what selective pressure has evolved as the best attention mechanism for one species to survive.

I pause here to note what from one point of view is an irrelevant aside and from another the heart of the matter.  Self-consciousness for Dennett can be no more than a repetition of the behavioral operations that define consciousness.  Any other view of it loses sight of evolutionary facts in a maze of poetic constructs and imaginings. There is, in short, no room in rationalist scientistic explanation for the Hegelian (and Shakespearean) idea that self-consciousness is the unprecedented act that shatters the continuum of causal and naturalistic explanation. No room, that is, for the idea that with the upsurge of the questions “who am I? what does it mean to exist? To die?” there emerges something fundamentally new in the order of experience that cannot be reduced to the laws that determined its origin.  Which is another way of saying what can no longer be said: namely, that the negativity of self-consciousness, the goad of inwardness, constantly revolutionizes the human subject’s relationship to itself. An evolutionary explanation for that activity will never be found because there is no place in this framework for the kind of “why” that the act of existential reflection breeds.  At best an evolutionary explanation of its value (“it helps inferior and depressive types survive”) will always lag far behind the revolutions that such a way of thinking and being produces as its inherent necessity.  Moreover, the insistence that such a view of thinking and self-consciousness must be dismissed out of hand illustrates the depth of the a priori ideological commitment to the assumption that evolutionary theory holds the key to the explanation of everything.  The ideology of science demands no less.  What physics once offered, biology will now provide.  Everything must be explained in terms of certain simple evolutionary and behavioral laws which make sense to us  a priori even when we groan under the reductiveness of what their application to poetry or love (say) forces us to say because these laws now define the very bounds of sense.  The genetic fallacy has become the royal road to the explanation of everything.  And there’s no way to break out of the circularity of scientistic explanation.  Any phenomenon that can’t be fit into the circle in which scientistic thought moves becomes of necessity meaningless.

From the perspective of evolutionary metaphysics all activities of the human subject are intelligible only when seen from a behavioral, adaptational perspective.  As Pinker argues, this is the key to understanding all of our emotions and actions—and thus of explanations of “the human heart” that satisfy our sworn opposition to all forms of mystification: hard-headed explanations of why we love and hate and suffer and rejoice and sacrifice ourselves to political causes and evolve the sexual—or mating—practices that we do. Carrying out the imperative implicit in scientistic metaphysics is fast becoming the sole way in which research is conducted and funded in the social sciences.   An ideology thus determines what we can and will know when we follow value-neutral, objective, scientific methods.  And the humanities must follow suit.  Ethics for Pinker is the simple application of biological imperatives to all social and personal questions of value.  The grand ideological conclusion is thereby attained. All those older ways of thinking that retard our adaptation to a scientistic view of things must be eliminated from progressive, leftist thought.  We will find no John Stuart Mill reading Wordsworth in the new scientific Utopia.  Poetry lacks any adaptive value. Indeed, as Edward O. Wilson instructs us, the Romantic poets were emotionally overwrought, Anti-Enlightenment apostles of the irrational and the inane.

The same can be said of Religion. Enter Sam Harris with the predictable scientistic argument that Religion is no more than the archaic survival of an earlier stage in our biological evolution.  We need not trouble ourselves with a psychoanalytic consideration of the complex motives and conflicts that enter into religious belief. All that’s needed is that superior,  smug scientistic condescension that Harris indulges at ridiculous length in a book that replicates an unremarkable thesis (“religion is irrational”) by applying it reductively to one religious belief after another, as if iteration and ridicule sufficed as a substitute for an in depth examination of the phenomena. As demystified, progressive thinkers all we need know—and repeat endlessly as our scientistic mantra—is that enlightenment rationality wedded to contemporary evolutionary neuroscience proves that there is no place for religion anymore. As leftists devoted to political progress we have no choice but to consign any remnant of religion to the flames.  Only one consequence need trouble our demystified bliss as we wait for the world to catch up with us. It is hard to rally the masses behind such a dispassioned, albeit enlightened, world-view. The current cry on the left for a recovery of religion is a response to that fact.

The Religious Ideology

Religion stands at the door.  Whence comes this uncanniest of guests?  As a corrective to scientistic reductionism and a sure fire way back to the Oval Office, all the left needs today according to some is a simple act of memory. So goes an argument of increasing popularity. Religion rallied the troops in the 60’s and can do so again.  The question of the ontological status of religion need not arise.  By the same token, religion is insulated from critique.  People need to believe. “There is no God and Mary is his mother.”  Santayana’s ontological atheism is thus trumped, as his great aphorism acknowledges, by psychological imperatives. In our new found dependence on religion we thereby dispense with what the leftist critique of religion has revealed in a historical line of continuity that stretches from Hegel through Feurbach and Marx to Nietzsche and Freud and from there through almost every major figure in 20th century European thought.  The briefest summary of the fundamental point that critique develops must here suffice.  As Hegel showed, religion is the way in which we simultaneously become aware of the inner powers of self-consciousness and alienate ourselves from that knowledge by positing our inherent powers as the property and agency of a transcendent Object. Undoing that alienation necessarily produces one result: the death of God.  This is the irony in which religion is trapped: it gives birth to an existential awareness that overcomes and disposes of religion through the recognition that the realization of human powers is the project of history. The longing for transcendental guarantess constitutes a flight from being in the world.

The attempted reclamation of religion for the left thus entails a regression that begets an insoluble contradiction.  Is our newfound religious belief heartfelt or is it the superior consciousness of those Grand Inquisitors who will give the masses what they need while preserving the Truth as the possession of those few who see through the illusions on which religion depends?  Is religion a temporary pathos the left must indulge for pragmatic purposes; or more cynically, an act of playing the religion card in order to manipulate the very people we claim to represent? If so, we have a strange revolution, one dedicated to keeping the majority of those it claims to represent in a condition of ignorance. Or are we true to our Word and actually believe that leftist thought requires religious grounding? If so, how do we establish that position without a violent erasure of our own history?  The critique of religion was the primary act through which the left became conscious of itself, i.e., of the insight that the truly “spiritual” force in history is a revolutionary self-consciousness wedded to negativity and self-overcoming.  Moreover, to sustain its mission that force must remain the sworn foe of any regression to those beliefs that had to be uprooted as the primary ideological causes blinding the masses to their historical situation by offering them the consolation of another world as the reward for passively suffering this one.  To put it more concretely, the critique of religion is the act whereby the left established history as something that could be known—and acted in—only through a systematic overcoming of all the transcendental guarantees that philosophy and religion have imposed on history.  Religion has always been a primary barrier to historical consciousness and the hardest one to overcome precisely because it is able to inculcate in masses of subjects the values and beliefs that lead them to either accept their condition or to assure themselves that its transcendence is guaranteed to them only in the beyond. For the disadvantaged religion has meant acceptance of their lot—as punishment, trial, transcendent justification (“blessed are the poor in spirit”)-- and when all else fails, as the final, ethical barrier to revolutionary action, since the one lesson religion engraves in us is the conviction that there are certain things we can never do, no matter how evil our oppressors, at the peril of our immortal soul, or what amounts to the same thing, our ethical self-respect. For wealthy believers religion offers something even worse: the assurance that they are saved by a God who loves them irrespective of the injustices that their position in the socio-economic order institutionalizes, since all that is required to prove one’s goodness is the affirmation of certain ethical platitudes that are conveniently realized in the private sphere of one’s personal relationships. Indeed, a glut of ethical self-congratulation is the first thing that comes once one has attained sufficient wealth.  For all that’s needed then is the assurance that one will get all the good things in the afterlife too.  To bank on that all one need do is take a seat in the front pew all the louder to bray one’s deep commitment to moral values.

There is, of course, one further motive behind the current return to religion and it is the most suspect one. Ours is, indeed, a dark time. And because that is so many are eaten up with the nostalgic longing for ontological guarantees in order to blunt the pain and the tragic imperatives of our situation.  Whenever the traumatic dimension of a historical situation becomes the motive for a return to religion , however, it begets the very thing that makes it impossible for us to comprehend history.  Belief in a-historical, transcendent, ontological guarantees is the Sartrean “bad faith” of religion before the reality of life. Religion condemns us to live in two worlds with the ghostly one always there to deliver us from the real one. Until we rid ourselves of the desire for transcendence—and without this desire no religion as we know it in the West does not exist—the guarantees that the Deity superimposes on experience will continue to block our understanding of history and our ability to act in it.

The left thus appears trapped on the horns of a dilemma. But only if the two ideologies discussed here are the only options open to us.  That is, of course, the primary function of ideology: to trap us in dichotomies and dilemmas.  Fortunately, there is a way to supplant both positions with a third that has the benefit of being concrete and experiential precisely where they are abstract.  I.e., by offering us a way of understanding both human subjects and social orders in depth in terms of the psychological, existential and historical complexities that constitute our situation.  That way is mapped by what I term existential psychoanalysis. 

Biographical Note:

Walter A Davis, Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University, is the author of a number of books. (For an overview se: www.walteradavis.com.)  His latest book Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 (London: Pluto P, 2006) is a psychoanalytic examination of Bush’s Amerika. He recently completed a book on Theatre and ideology and is currently working on two long books: one a theory of psyche as tragic process, the other a novel currently titled The Last Catholic. He can be reached at:davis.65@osu.edu.

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