Saw your post today. I really do think that modern Leftism is best understood as a religion. I realize also that understanding something as if it were a religion is different from saying it is a religion, and so I've just written a response to your post, in which I try to make the case that Progressivism is, in effect, a religion to the people who espouse it — that it activates all the same behaviors and cognitive postures.
I'm hoping we might come to a "meeting of the minds" on this one, because I believe that seeing the Left as embodying a religion is, when it comes to having to deal with them, a helpful (and accurate) stance for the rest of us.
I will have to read Malcolm's lengthy response, but for now a couple of quick rejoinders.
1) Is leftism a religion to the people who espouse it? I rather doubt it. I don't think your average committed lefty would cop to being religious in his beliefs and practices. If you could find me a communist or other atheistic leftist who understands his stance as religious I would be very surprised. Of course there are 'progressives' who are members of Christian and other churches. They water down Christianity to bring it in line with their 'progressivism.' They are lefties first, and Christians second, if at all. But we are not talking about them.
2) Why is it "helpful" for us in our battles with destructive leftists to view them as adhering to and promoting a religion? I say it is not helpful. It is obfuscatory and inaccurate. It blurs important distinctions. And it is unnecessary.
But if people want to say that leftism functions in the psychic economy of a committed leftist in a manner closely analogous to the way religion functions in the psychic economy of a committed religionist, then I have no objection. Just don't say that leftism is a religion. Or if you insist on using the sentence 'Leftism is a religion,' make sure you make it clear that you are using it to express the above proposition.
Just as a salt substitute is not salt, a substitute for religion in the life of a leftist is not a religion.
Via Malcolm Pollack, I came to an essay by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar in which surprising claims are made with which Pollack agrees but I don't. Deresiewicz:
Selective private colleges have become religious schools. [Emphasis added.] The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.
[. . .]
What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern. The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.
Dennis Prager is another who considers leftism to be a religion:
For at least the last hundred years, the world’s most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam.
It has been leftism.
Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.
I begin with Prager and return to Deresiewicz.
While I agree with the rest of Prager's column, I have trouble with his characterization of leftism as a religion.
It is true that leftism is like a religion in certain key respects. But if one thing is like another it does not follow that the first is a species of the other. Whales are like fish in certain key respects, but a whale is not a fish but a mammal. Whales live in the ocean, can stay underwater for long periods of time and have strong tails to propel themselves. Just like many fish. But whales are not fish.
I should think that correct taxonomies in the realm of ideas are just as important as correct taxonomies in the realm of flora and fauna.
Leftism is an anti-religious political ideology that functions in the lives of its adherents much like religions function in the lives of their adherents. This is the truth to which Prager alludes with his sloppy formulation, "leftism is a religion." Leftism in theory is opposed to every religion as to an opiate of the masses, to employ the figure of Karl Marx. In practice, however, today's leftists are rather strangely soft on the representatives of the 'religion of peace.' (What's more, if leftism were a religion, then, given that leftism is opposed to religion, it follows that leftism is opposed to itself, except that it is not.)
Or you could say that leftism is an ersatz religion for leftists. 'Ersatz' here functions as an alienans adjective. It functions like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.' A decoy duck is not a duck. A substitute for religion is not a religion. Is golf a religion? Animal rescue?
An ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs. That genus divides into the two species religious ideologies and nonreligious ideologies. Leftism, being "overwhelmingly secular" just as Prager says, is a nonreligious ideology. It is not a religion, but it shares some characteristics with religions and functions for its adherents as a substitute for religion.
You might think to accuse me of pedantry. What does it matter that Prager sometimes employs sloppy formulations? Surely it is more important that leftism be defeated than that it be fitted into an optimal taxonomy!
Well yes, slaying the dragon is Job One. But we also need to persuade intelligent and discriminating people. Precision in thought and speech is conducive to that end. And that is why I say, once more: Language matters!
Now let's consider the criteria that Deresiewicz adduces in support of his thesis that the elite liberal schools are religious. There seem to be two: these institutions (i) promulgate dogmas (ii) opposition to which is heresy. It is true that in religions there are dogmas and heresies. But communism was big on the promulgation of dogmas and the hounding of opponents as heretics.
Communism, however, is not a religion. At most, it is like a religion and functions like a religion in the lives of its adherents. As I said above, if X is like Y, it does not follow that X is a species of Y. If colleges and universities today are leftist seminaries — places where the seeds of leftism are sown into skulls full of fertile mush — it doesn't follow that these colleges and universities are religious seminaries. After all, the collegiate mush-heads are not being taught religion but anti-religion.
Pace Deresiewicz, there is nothing religious or "sacred" about extreme environmentalism. After all it is a form of idolatry, nature idolatry, and insofar forth, anti-religious.
Why would a critic of leftism want to label it a religion? Prager, who promotes religion, might be thinking along these lines: "You lefties cannot criticize religion since you have one too; it is just that yours is an inferior religion." Someone who opposes religion might be thinking along the following lines: "Religion is a Bad Thing, not conducive to human flourishing; leftism is a religion; ergo, leftism is a Bad Thing too."
This may be what is going on in Deresiewicz's mind. He is opposed to extreme leftism and thinks he can effectively attack it by labeling it a religion. This strategy encapsulates two mistakes. First, leftism is not a religion. Second, religion is a good thing. (I would even go so far as to argue that Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of theism" (Arthur Schopenhauer, reference and quotation here), has been of service to the benighted peoples who know no better religion: they are better off with Islam than with no religion at all.) There is also the question whether dogmas are bad for us.
But now's not the time to worry about whether religion with its dogmas is good for humans. My present point is that leftism is not a religion, and that no good purpose is served by confusing it with a religion.
Isn't This All Just a Semantic Quibble?
I don't think so. It goes to the question whether religion has an essence or nature. Some say it doesn't: the concept religion does not pick out an essence because it is a family-resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense. I say religion has an essence and that the following points are ingredient in that essence:
1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents. So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is a spiritual reality. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.
2. The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)
3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.
4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.
5. The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.
6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.
7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.
If I have nailed down the essence of religion, then it follows that leftism, which is a form of secular humanism, is not a religion. Leftism collides with religion on all of these points. This is not a semantic claim but an ontological one. And the issue is not a quibble because it is important.
In sum. We must try to think as clearly as we can. We must therefore not confuse what is distinct. Hence we ought not confuse leftism with a religion.
In the last few weeks, there has been a spate of columns by writers on the left condemning the left-wing college students who riot, take over university buildings and shout down speakers with whom they differ.
These condemnations, coming about 50 years too late, should not be taken seriously.
[. . .]
Here's the problem:
It is the left that transformed universities into the moral and intellectual wastelands most are now.
It is the left that created the moral monsters known as left-wing students who do not believe in free speech, let alone tolerance.
It is the left that has taught generations of young Americans that America is essentially a despicable society that is racist and xenophobic to its core.
It is the left that came up with the lie that the university has been overrun by a "culture of rape."
It is the left that taught generations of Americans that everyone on the right is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist and bigoted.
It is the left that is anti-intellectual, teaching students to substitute feelings for reason.
Neven Sesardic’s recent book, When Reason Goes on Holiday, provides a detailed account of the morally questionable actions undertaken in the interest of political causes by some of the most important philosophers in the analytic tradition: Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Imre Lakatos, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, among several others. Some of their actions were not just questionable from a moral point of view, but outright reprehensible. Yet, as Sesardic points out in the conclusion to his book, the reaction from the philosophical community has been one of utter indifference . . . .
Concerned as he rightly is with the pollution of the physical environment, the liberal yet cannot seem to muster much moral enthusiasm over the pollution of the cultural environment, if he's even aware of it. Hillary, you will recall, cozied up to Jay Z. If you don't know who he is, good.
Trump Labor Secretary nominee Anthony Puzder is under fire for having employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. But why should liberals care given that they do not distinguish legal from illegal immigrants while standing for open borders and sanctuary jurisdictions in defiance of the rule of law? Suddenly, these destructive leftists care about immigration law? Liberals should praise Puzder for giving the poor woman a job. After all, as they say, no human being is illegal!
What the Left is doing here is employing a Saul Alinsky tactic. The fourth of his Rules for Radicals reads:
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Leftists judge us by rules for which they have nothing but contempt.
The ordinary hypocrite will not practice what he preaches, but at least he preaches, thereby paying lip service to ideals of conduct that he puts forth as binding on all. The Alinksyite leftist is a hyper-hypocrite who preaches ideals of conduct, not to all, but to his enemies, ideals that he has no intention of honoring.
Of course, I am not saying that Puzder did not do wrong in hiring the illegal immigrant. He did, assuming he knew she was illegal.
Neven Sesardić is a Croatian philosopher, born in 1949. He has taught philosophy at universities in Croatia, the United States, Japan, England, and Hong Kong. An earlier book of his is Making Sense of Heritability (Cambridge U. P., 2005).
“Gripping, thoroughly researched and documented, judiciously argued, and alternately depressing and infuriating, Sesardić’s courageous book offers the astounding spectacle of some of the greatest minds of the past century―including Carnap, Einstein, Gödel, and Wittgenstein―adopting odious political views, supporting Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, for simplistic and plainly fallacious reasons. More shocking still is the story of how prominent journals, encyclopedias, and the American Philosophical Association itself have sacrificed academic integrity on the altar of political activism. Great philosophers repeatedly reveal themselves as terrible thinkers when it comes to morality and politics, plunging headlong into complex controversies without drawing elementary distinctions or differentiating degrees of good or evil.” ―Daniel Bonevac, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin
The book arrived yesterday. Flipping though it, I was surprised and pleased to find a quotation from one William Vallicella on p. 168. This is from a letter that protests a proposed group resolution on the death penalty:
What then could justify the APA in taking sides on the sort of broadly philosophical issues that tend to become bones of contention in the political arena? . . . Furthermore, by what principle was the death penalty chosen as the topic of an APA resolution rather than, say, partial-birth abortions? Should the APA endorse a package of positions, issuing pronunciamentos on the Balanced Budget Amendment, handgun control and ebonics? If not, why not? (William Vallicella).
Here is a second, later letter of protest (November 2003) that I sent to the A. P. A. before cancelling my membership:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada responding to the fatal shooting at the Centre culturel islamique de Québec located in the Ste-Foy neighbourhood of the city of Québec:
Diversity is our strength, and religious tolerance is a value that we, as Canadians, hold dear.
I should think that strength derives from unity, not diversity. "United we stand; divided we fall." See Mark 3:25: "And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand"; Matthew 12:25: "And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand," and Luke 11:17: "But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth."
Diversity is of course good within limits. But a diversity worth having must submit to the control and discipline of the competing value, unity. Otherwise, diversity divides and destroys.
Given that we are united in our commitment to religious liberty, we can tolerate a diversity of religious and anti-religious views. Unfortunately, Islam is not known for its toleration of competing faiths and non-faiths. In its core doctrine Islam is radically totalitarian and suppressive of dissent. So radical Islam cannot be tolerated since it opposes toleration and religious liberty.
A diversity so diverse that it tolerates the enemies of toleration and diversity is destructive.
Much of the yammering about diversity by liberals is nothing but empty virtue-signalling. Liberals need to show appreciation for the competing value of unity. Until they do so we should denounce them as destructive fools.
I of course condemn the attack on the Québec mosque.
All this raises an uncomfortable question for people who have no use for PC’s agenda, and who value the freedom to think for themselves. How do you respond to someone who is determined to smear you for your alleged bigotry regardless of what you think and why? How do you win an argument against someone who willfully changes the meaning of words, maintains that the truth is completely relative, and feels perfectly justified in accusing virtually anyone of the gravest moral failure?
If our opponents are going to accuse us of being evil-minded bigots, regardless of what we say or think, then what’s the point in bothering to convince them otherwise?
Enter the right-wing postmodern antihero. Unlike just about every other presidential candidate who ran on the Republican ticket, Trump grasps our postmodern culture intuitively, and put it to use with devastating effect.
As the horrors of the next four years unfold, with Climate Change deniers, women's reproductive rights opponents, public school opponents, gun enthusiasts, proponents of eliminating any minimum wage at all, those eager to up the rate of deportations, and war starters in control of the government, there are people on the left who will devote all their time and energy to condemning what they see as the inadequate ideological purity of others well to the left of the center of American politics.
This is typical leftist stuff from a very intelligent and learned man. Judging from it, how could one imagine a fruitful conversation with a leftist?
My thesis is that productive discussions with leftists are highly unlikely. This is because they take as settled questions that to an objective and fair-minded person are not settled. My present point is not that they give the wrong answers, although I believe they do; my present point is that leftists refuse to admit as genuine questions what are in fact genuine questions.
Climate Change
A skeptic is a doubter, not a denier. To doubt or inquire or question whether such-and-such is the case is not to deny that it is the case. It is a cheap rhetorical trick of Global Warming (GW) activists to speak of GW denial and posture as if it is in the ball park of Holocaust denial. People who misuse language in this way signal that they are not interested in a serious discussion. When GW activists speak in this way they give us even more reason to be skeptical. Their claim is not just that there is global warming, but that there is catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming, the human and non-human causes of which are understood, and that this catastrophic warming trend can be stopped or impeded by human efforts, efforts the effect of which will not be as bad, or worse, that the effects of the supposed catastrophic, man-made, global warming. Obviously, there is quite a lot to be skeptical about here. For one thing, has it been established that the human contribution to global warming is large enough to justify drastic measures?
Women's Reproductive Rights
To subsume abortion under the rubric of women's reproductive right is willfully to blind oneself to the moral questions that abortion raises. Again, there is a refusal to admit as genuine questions what are in fact genuine questions.
Education
To support vouchers and school choice is not to oppose public education. Here again a signature tactic of the leftist ideologue: the slandering of the political opponent and the refusal to present his position fairly.
Enough of the howling of Howlin' Wolff and his pack of destructives. This garbage is really beneath reply. Luckily, we now have a president who knows how to counterpunch.
Cultural polluter Madonna has crowned herself poster girl of the pussy riot. Destructive leftists will justify as free speech her border-line incitement to violence. But the right to free speech is not absolute. Observations on Free Speech, #9:
9. To say that the right to free expression is a natural right is not to say that it is absolute. For the exercise of this right is subject to various reasonable and perhaps even morally obligatory restrictions, both in public and in private. There are limits on the exercise of the right in both spheres, but one has the right in both spheres. To have an (exercisable) right is one thing, to exercise it another, and from the fact that one has the right it does not follow that one has the right to its exercise in every actual and possible circumstance. If you say something I deem offensive in my house, on my blog, or while in my employ, then I can justifiably throw you out, or shut you up, or fire you and you cannot justify your bad behavior by invocation of the natural right to free speech. And similarly in public: the government is justified in preventing you from from shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, to use the hackneyed example. You are not thereby deprived of the right; you are deprived of the right to exercise the right in certain circumstances.
