[FRA:] Secularism, Utopia & the Discernment of Myth

[Ralph Dumain]

Boer, Roland. "Secularism, Utopia and the 
Discernment of Myth," Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 7 (Fall 2005).
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/secular/boer.htm

Roland Boer has written a number of books and 
articles on Marxism and religion, and has a blog, 
too.  More on all that later.  For the moment, this article . . .

Boer seeks a way to characterize properly the 
free-lance sensibilities of contemporary 
"spiritual experience". Four issues to address are:
secularism, post-structuralism, utopian 
possibilities of religion, and the discernment of 
myths (after Ernst Bloch).  I'm guessing that he 
really meant to write post-secularism rather than post-structuralism.

Post-secularism is manifested by the pervasive 
practice of asserting that one is spiritual, not 
religious. In the utopian realm, Boer seeks a 
shared language of spiritual experiences that do 
not erase differences. Secularism and 
post-secularism are inseparable and dialectically 
related. Contrary to the settled conception of 
secularization now, the concept was much 
contested in the 19th century prior to the 
interventions of Max Weber and Karl Lowith. 
Considering alternatives to the latter two, Boer 
begins with Walter Benjamin (The Origin of German 
Tragic Drama). Boer's description of Benjamin's 
notion of secularization is unintelligible to me, 
but it has something to do with the fall of 
theological/historical time into spatialization 
and taxonomy, termed "natural history". 
Benjamin's work reveals that religion has been 
(tacitly?) equated with Christianity, and 
secularization effectively equals the negation of 
Christianity. Religion is often assumed to 
pertain to the supermundane, supernatural realm, 
though it has taken on a broader meaning as well. 
Boer is unclear here, but he mentions 
anthropological studies and studies of religions 
outside of Christianity (and Judaism). All the 
analytical tools brought to bear on non-western 
non-Christian belief systems are actually secular 
translations of the categories of Christian religion.

Boer sees something pernicious in this, 
apparently, but his next move is to shifts to a 
discussion of Adorno's critiques of Kierkegaard 
and Heidegger. Key here is that . . .

The language of theology, appropriated by 
Heidegger and existentialism, has the distinct 
ideological role of producing patterns of 
subordination to an absolute authority, which 
became fascism rather than God and the Church. 
The theological language of existentialism - 
which drew its sacredness from the cult of 
authenticity rather than Christianity – becomes, 
for Adorno, an ideological schema particularly 
suited to fascism, for which it functioned not so 
much as an explicit statement, but as a “refuge,” 
a mystification that gave voice to an ostensible 
salvation from alienation that functioned as a 
virulent justification of oppression, the 
“smoldering evil” (Adorno 1965, 9) of fascism.
Boer equates this view to a critique of idolatry 
one can find in Adorno's writings. Proceeding further . . .

Secularization then becomes a process riven with 
contradictions, one whose rejection of 
Christianity relies on Christianity, and this, I 
would suggest, is one of the main reasons for the 
fact that secularization never quite seemed to succeed . . .
Boer's overall argument doesn't make a bit of 
sense to me.  Mini-arguments here and there do, 
but the overall structure of the argument doesn't 
cohere.  Here is one piece, though, that is 
exceptionally lucid, and socially accurate:

The flowering of the myriad forms of religious 
expression and experience for which the 
secularization hypothesis could not account is 
instead described in terms of spirituality, the 
properly post-secular religion. I don’t want to 
trace the Christian history of the term 
“spirituality,” but one of its features is that 
it relies upon the widespread knowledge of a 
whole range of religious practices that would not 
have been possible without the study of religions 
in the first place, without the endless 
cataloguing and study of religions from the most 
ancient, such as Sumeria and Babylon or 
pre-historic humans, to the most contemporary 
forms, such as the well-known Heaven’s Gate group 
that committed suicide, all shod with Nike shoes, 
when the comet Hale-Bopp appeared on earth’s 
horizon. Apparently emptied of doctrines to which 
one must adhere, or of institutions that 
carefully guard salvation, or of specific groups 
bound by language and ethnic identity, 
spirituality enables one to recover lost or 
repressed practices, such as Wicca or Yoruba 
sacrifice, but to pick and choose elements that 
seem to suit individual lifestyles or 
predilections. It allows one to designate the 
vitality of indigenous religions (which are no 
longer religion but spirituality), as a lost 
source of connectedness with the land, with 
nature, or other human beings. Unfortunately, 
however, spirituality’s private piety and 
devotion comes at the expense of any collective 
agenda. It also relies on both liberal pluralism 
and tolerance, as well as the profound 
reification of social and cultural life that is 
everywhere around us. You can practice your own 
particular spirituality in your small corner, as 
long you don’t bother me, we say. Like 
secularization, spirituality itself depends upon 
its own contradiction: both rely upon the religion they reject.
This is a dead-on description of all the upper 
middle class New Agers I've met in recent years.

Boer next shifts to a discussion of Utopia, 
taking off from the thought of Ernst Bloch. 
Again, there's a passage I can't make any sense out of:
What is often forgotten is that the hermeneutics 
of suspicion and recovery in political approaches 
such as feminism, post-colonial criticism and 
liberation theology owe a debt to Bloch. It seems 
to me that the effort to locate a shared language 
of “spiritual experience,” one that is sensitive 
to variations of social, political and cultural 
difference, relies upon a utopian project in the best sense(s) of the term.
One of Bloch's central insights was not only to 
discern utopian impulses, but to note that when 
they include yearning for a lost golden age, 
their regression has already set in. Utopianism should be future oriented.

A utopian hermeneutics seeks

The problem with seeking a shared language is 
that religions embody mutually exclusive world 
views. And there is no unmediated experience. 
Attempts to transcend difference betray origins, 
as is the case with Rudolph Otto.

Once again, Boer's logic eludes me, but his next 
move is to seek a unifying principle in myth.

Even more than religion per se, the Enlightenment 
target of secularization was myth, a term that 
had acquired an unwieldy cluster of associations: 
untruth, confusion, fuzzy thinking, the ideology 
of oppression, and so on. Myth found itself 
driven from town to town, expelled by the 
enlightened burghers, only to retreat to the 
forests and deserts, the realm of Nature, where a 
few wayward individuals might have some use for 
it. Faced with the use of myth by the Nazis and 
other sundry fascists, with their notions of 
blood and soil and the Blond Beast, Walter 
Benjamin and Theodor Adorno saw only the negative 
aspects of the term. For Benjamin, the ultimate 
form of myth was capitalism, as he traced in The 
Arcades Project (1999), and so he sought a way 
beyond myth, a waking from the dream, that made 
use of biblical motifs. Unfortunately, he 
remained trapped within the myth of the Bible 
itself. For Adorno (1999), myth was the 
antithesis of utopia. Myth was the realm of the 
unitary principle, the abolition of non-identity 
that is characteristic of a world dominated by 
men. For both Adorno and Benjamin, utopia meant the end of myth.
Boer prefers Bloch:

For Bloch, myth is neither pure false 
consciousness that needs to be unmasked, nor a 
positive force without qualification. Like 
ideologies, all myths, no matter how repressive, 
have an emancipatory-utopian dimension that 
cannot be separated from deception and illusion. 
Thus, in the very process of manipulation and 
domination, myth also has a moment of utopian 
residue, an element that opens up other 
possibilities at the very point of failure. Bloch 
is particularly interested in biblical myth, for 
the subversive elements in the myths that 
interest him are enabled by ideologies both repetitious and repressive.
Further down . . .

At his best, Bloch’s discernment of myth is an 
extraordinary approach, for it enables us to 
interpret the myths of any religion or 
spirituality as neither completely reprehensible 
nor utterly beneficial. That is to say, it is 
precisely through and because of the myths of 
dominance and despotism that those of cunning and 
non-conformism can exist. It is not merely that 
we cannot understand the latter without the 
former, but that the former enables the latter.
Two examples from the Bible are given, the first 
concerning Eden, the second, death.

In the end, then, the value of religions like 
Christianity is that they have tapped into this 
utopian desire for something beyond death. Their 
mistake for Bloch is that they want to say 
something definite about death. But that 
something is hardly definite: it is mythology, 
and for that we need a discerning eye that can 
see both the liberating and repressive features of those myths.
I find Boer's conclusion most unsatisfactory and downright irritating:
If we follow through the dialectical relationship 
between secularism and post-secularism - a 
contradictory logic in which secularism turns out 
to rely on the Christianity it everywhere denies, 
a logic that appears starkly in a post-secularism 
that cannot be thought without secularism - then 
myth turns out to be the most urgent religious or 
spiritual question for us. Rather than the 
problem-ridden term “spirituality”, I have argued 
that Bloch’s hermeneutics of the discernment of 
myth provides not only a productive method, but 
also an approach to the utopian desire that lies 
behind any effort to find a shared “religious” or 
“spiritual” language. Such a language needs to be 
both critical and appreciative, for myths work in 
an extremely cunning fashion. It is a process 
that enables on the one hand the identification 
of those myths, or even elements within a myth, 
that are oppressive, misogynist, racist, that 
serve a ruling elite, and on the other, those 
which are subversive, liberating and properly 
socialist or even democratic ­ in other words, utopian.
I have a number of objections here, beginning 
with another instance of a chronic lack of 
logical clarity. How does Jewish secularism rely 
on Christianity?  Or Indian, or Japanese? Suppose 
one rejects post-secular ideologies: New Age 
spirituality, etc.? Then how is myth the most 
urgent spiritual question, other than to 
neutralize it? Why should there be a spiritual 
language at all, shared or not? Why should 
anything subversive, liberating, or socialist be 
seen in mythical expressions in the 21st century? 
There's not an atom of it that is progressive in 
any way. Myth can only be productively scavenged 
retrospectively, by those not under its grip. 
Myth in any form is not adequate to the 
comprehension of contemporary society. 
Considering the problem more widely, popular 
symbology simply can't encapsulate the truth 
content of the state of our society at this time. 
Indeed, after the waning of the various 
countercultures of the 1950s-70s, I see nothing 
left for popular mythology to do.  The good 
intentions of the past need to be salvaged as 
well as criticized for their naivete. (I've 
addressed this with respect to the individual 
mysticisms of avant-garde jazz musicians.) What 
myth is alive today needs to be killed off and 
dissected.  In any case, Boer should be more 
clear and specific about what he's after.