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Augustine, chastened intellectualism, Communism, Four Noble Truths, Fredric Jameson, Jesus, Karl Marx, Pali suttas, Paul LePage, Scott Walker, United States
The past couple weeks in the United States have been very congenial to a Marxist worldview. I don’t remember any time when the bourgeoisie has so clearly been waging war on the proletariat – or when that kind of language seemed an accurate description of contemporary society. The best known example of this is the ongoing conflict in Wisconsin, where the newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to strip public-sector workers of both their generous benefits and their rights to collective bargaining. With a limited grasp of the local situation (such as Margaret Wente demonstrates in this breathtakingly ignorant column), one might imagine that this is primarily a matter of shared sacrifice in a time of burgeoning government debt. That view is plausible, and entirely wrong. For not only did Walker recently enact corporate tax cuts in a volume comparable to the workers’ benefits, the unions agreed to let their costly benefits be cut if they could keep their right to collective bargaining. This action isn’t about reasonable budget cuts, but about union-busting, plain and simple.
Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle.
The same battles come up in the federal government, where House Republicans have prepared a measure to deny food stamps – the main US provision to ensure people do not starve – to striking workers. If you fight for better labour conditions, the logic appears to go, you deserve to die hungry. Some irony that all this is taking place around the 100th anniversary of the industrial disaster that helped create labour laws and labour movement in the US. (Keep in mind, too, that unions are already extraordinarily weak in the US; less than 10% of private-sector employees belong to a union, and even in the public sector the number is less than 40%.)
It has been hard for me to go through the past couple of weeks without hearing the voice of Karl Marx saying “I told you so”: class struggles are real, and the government takes the side of the property owners. It’s true that these active gratuitous assaults on labour movement are all perpetrated by Republicans, but they are just further assaults on unions that were already weakened with Democratic complicity. (Republicans have recently taken on the sadly amusing habit of calling Obama a “socialist.” Would that it were so.) I haven’t been a Marxist for a long time, but this year’s events go a long way toward making me one – not just in terms of the problem of alienation, where I’ve already discussed my agreement with Marx, but also with respect to his more central issue of class conflict.
But what I also said about Marx before still applies: he was wrong about the future. There was and will be no new preferable order. The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson quoted an anonymous “someone” as having said “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”; as it turns out, Jameson himself had said something like this in an earlier work. I think it’s hard to dispute this quote. There is a varied number of disasters, some narrowly averted, that could mean the end of humanity: global nuclear war, emerging pandemic, change to the natural environment that comes too quickly for us to stop. But humanity going on after capitalism? It’s not entirely unthinkable, but at this point it’s very difficult to envision what that would look like, when the only really serious attempt at an alternative not only failed, but destroyed millions of lives and families along the way.
Just as before, I think there’s a close parallel between Marxism and Christianity – though rather than Jesus and the early Christians, I’m thinking here of probably the most profound and influential Christian thinker, Augustine. What Marx and Augustine share, to use Greek medical terms, is a combination of penetrating diagnosis and wrong prognosis. Augustine is quite right to point out his central “chastened intellectualist” theme of human weakness: when we make attempts at self-improvement, the persistence of our bad habits shows us just how hard it is to be better, even how much we rationalize the bad habits to ourselves. When we place our individual weakness beside the terrible crimes committed by other human beings – some of the worst having been committed in Marx’s own name – it is easy to see the power of Augustine’s mistrust of human virtue, like Marx’s insights into class conflict and alienation.
Yet Augustine’s way forward is no better than Marx’s. In his eyes, our troubles will be resolved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ if we open ourselves up to his grace, allowing ourselves a perfectly virtuous and happy life after death. But I’ve noted before that I don’t see any reason to believe in such a thing; and even if I did, I would have significant objections to worshipping the God he describes, who damns human beings to eternal torment.
Augustine and Marx, then, both insightfully diagnose a problem but leave us without a good solution. I used to think Buddhism offered us a good way out of this dilemma, through a critique of hope: accept that the world is not as it should be, and just deal with reducing your suffering. But then Buddhists have their own kind of hope, which I also find wrong-headed: the idea that suffering can be entirely eliminated, that we can reach a state of nirvana. In Buddhism too, we face a powerful and perceptive diagnosis in the Second Noble Truth, with a misinformed prognosis in the Third.
What the poor prognoses of Marx, Augustine and the Pali suttas all share, indeed, is hope, optimism: an optimism entirely uncalled for given their pessimistic diagnoses. There isn’t going to be a new social order, and we’re going to remain surrounded by a suffering that ends in death. Nor, as the Stoics and Epicureans that Augustine criticized might think, will we be able to make ourselves good enough to transcend our evil or our suffering. No, things don’t look good for humans, and there’s no straightforward solution in sight. All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.
There is a serious deficiency of wisdom in the approaches of Marx, Augustine, and the Pali suttas. They are all moralistic in their approaches. Morality is an element of wisdom, but it does not exhaust the latter. Common sense, prudence and skillful action are also important aspects of wisdom.
Class conflict is ONE kind of conflict among human beings. The roots of conflict among human beings lie buried in human nature, in human biology and/or consciousness, in the diversity of their constitutive formations and tendencies. This diversity not only makes conflict possible, but actively engenders it. In other words, once you have diversity, a diversity of individuals and their needs, desires, beliefs, goals, values, etc., the clash and conflict of opposites comes into being in its myriad forms. This is just the way reality, nature and human social reality, is and we better acknowledge and accept it.
In any case, Marx failed to adequately address and provide explanations for why there is class conflict at all. No wonder his recipes for solving it have turned out be ghastly in their results.
Hope and optimism need to be rooted in wisdom and not fantasy, not even a noble fantasy.
“There isn’t going to be a new social order, and we’re going to remain surrounded by a suffering that ends in death.”
A new social order cannot be wished and brought tailor-made into existence. It is like the growth of a tree. History shows us that new social orders, good and bad, emerge in various ways and are not always predictable.. As Alexander Herzen beautifully put it “History has no libretto.” Contrary to “Marxist Witchcraft”, there are no formulas or incantations which will bring about a new social order or even shorten its birth pangs.
“Nor, as the Stoics and Epicureans that Augustine criticized might think, will we be able to make ourselves good enough to transcend our evil or our suffering.”
But surely we can grow in wisdom and reduce our evil and suffering?
“things don’t look good for humans, and there’s no straightforward solution in sight”
Would you agree that we have come a long way, that there have been slow and subtle positive changes in human consciousness, in its moral sensibility, in its capacity to reach beyond ego, the family, the group, the nation, and the species? Of course, there is no solvent for all human ills. How could there be one solvent when the problems and/or their causes are complex and diverse?
“All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.”
Why must “all we can do” is only “keep stumbling”? Why can’t we hold the flickering lamp of wisdom and walk steady even if we stumble many times? And would you agree that wisdom and its growth is what makes successful the “task of finding enough joy, truth, and interest in life to make it well worth living”?
After reading your eloquent, but rather dark post, my conviction on the primacy of wisdom for living well has only grown stronger. Thank you.
Amod! It looks like you need to be saved from politics again. ;)
I dare say that he may also need to be saved from Buddhism and its life-sapping, delight-busting outlook! :(
Heh. You may be right, Grad. Thing is, I’ve always cared about politics even at my most anti-political, like a sports fan. And it does seem worth thinking about, since so many great philosophers (usually non-Indian) make it part of their system, and it does provide interesting analogies for the good life. But it’s always worth keeping in mind how much overconcern with politics can hurt us.
Amod, you are wrong in equating the third noble truth with hope. While the view is understandable, it is a beginning meditator’s view that is outgrown with practice. Cessation of suffering comes from understanding in a direct way the origin of suffering. Suffering is created through attachment and letting go of the attachment is itself cessation of suffering. Cessation of suffering cannot be achieved by grasping through hope because hope is, itself, attachment.
In poetic language, Buddhism speaks of the “heretics and bandits of hope and fear”. Hope and fear are connected to attachment. Fear is a reaction to losing something one desires (a job, a wife, perhaps) or gaining something that one has aversion to (cancer, perhaps). Hope is the opposite. With hope, we look to gain something we desire (a new job, a new wife perhaps) or to get rid of something we have aversion to (maybe, a cure for cancer). Both states of mind are therefore based on attachment and discontent with the present circumstances.
I have always liked the Buddhist view of hope because it runs so counter to our popular modern view that happiness can be achieved by satisfying desires and avoiding unpleasant circumstances. For example, the Buddhist view of hope turns the modern Western view of the myth of Pandora on its head. In the modern view, Pandora’s jar let lose disease and all things that generate fear — but then hope emerges as a blessing at the end. I think a Buddhist would see all of the fears released from Pandora’s jar as just precursors to the worst development of all — the advent of hope, which is the view that binds us to the treadmill of samsara.
The third noble truth is cessation of suffering and an aspect of this — a by product — is freedom from hope and fear.
Jim, I think you’re missing something here as well. While it’s true that hope and desire must ultimately be given up to reach nibbana, they are nevertheless the motivator for getting people onto the Buddhist path. If there is no hope or desire that suffering be eliminated (or even just reduced), then there is no reason to follow the path; everything’s the same.
Yes. It really is a koan. But hope is given up in stages. In some sense, the stages of the Buddhist path are progressive refinements in view or motivation. Because hope represents a wrong view, it has to be given up progressively at various stages of the path.
For example, at an early stage, the hope of stabilizing our minds may have to be given up in exchange for a willingness to sit uncomfortably with hot boredom. And the giving up itself allows mind to settle.
Then, the sense of maintaining a stable mind as a goal or hope may have to be given up in exchange for a cool curiosity toward our environment and others.
The point is that cessation of suffering happens now, not later. Otherwise, if suffering had no cessation, we would not be able to see and describe suffering (because suffering is conditional and can only be described based on an understanding of its cessation).
So the koan is that we are basically fine, but we still need the path. It’s like Suzuki Roshi said when asked about what he thought about his students: “I think they are all enlightened — and they could all use a little work.”
Amod:
Recently deceased Joe Bageant had his take on why the majority of American workers, ie the bulk of the country continue to support a system which brutalises them. What you might call ajnana he called dumbass ignorant. He puts it down to television and mass media that washes out the critical intelligence and replaces it with images of success and affluence that have no bearing on reality. Essentially they are betrayed by a poor education system that does not encourage critical thinking. When one thinks that what is seen in Europe is the best that American TV can offer the bulk can only be very very bad. He may be right about that. I would add that an electoral system (FPTP) that results in a permanent 2 party system where triangulation over many electoral cycles means that there is not much to choose between them adds the further illusion of democratic choice. Vast swathes of opinion are not represented at all. That must lead to seething resentment. And Obama, what a fraud.
So what changes a system like that? An inner collapse brought about by a hollowing out of commitment to its leading ideas much as Soviet Communism. The rise of China as the ultimate command capitalist society. Interesting times ahead.
Amod, I agree that hope cannot be proven. There is no way to establish that our flawed world will ever change or be susbstituted by any better one. Hence, one might think, unless and until contradictory evidence, it is sounder to assume that things will always be the same. Of course, as long as we remember that this is also an unproven assumption, only based on similarity.
Simone Weil says somewhere that the mistake of Marx was to say that by walking straight forward, we would rise into the air.
I had indeed not heard about the events in Maine you mention. Wow. Pretty clear, the message they send, ain’t it?
As to hope, I’ve said a bit on it before. As a Christian I am of course bound to believe that the context of all contexts is Good. But any horizon more proximate than this looks fairly scary to me. Still, this isn’t the whole point. Who will I be when whatever is below that horizon arrives? That is something I have some say in — though Augustine & the Buddha both underscore that I can best utilize this “say” by not shouting at myself too loud, if you see what I mean.
While not a Christian, I tend to agree on a practical level. It’s possible to hold a Marxist hope at the same level as the Christian, where eventually people will come up with a system that preserves the best of capitalism while getting rid of its many severe problems, but it’s not going to happen for hundreds of years. None of us alive today will live to see the eschatological promise fulfilled. In our lifetimes, which is to say in the meantime, what matters is who we are – and as I think you note, that’s difficult enough to do something about.
“As a Christian I am of course bound to believe that the context of all contexts is Good.”
Skholiast, does this “Good” also include the prospects of apocalypse and eternal damnation for the “sinners”? Wouldn’t you agree that this is an odd sort of “Good” to say the least?
Marx’s intellectual dishonesty is evident in the following remark he made in a letter to Engels. The context is some comments he made in print on the Indian “mutiny” of 1857:
“It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.” (p. 152, Vol. 40, Collected Works, Lawrence and Wishart)
I wonder how many more propositions we can find in his writings which he “so worded as to be right either way.” Sounds like a good project for research!
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