On religion and politics

About that which religion refers to (or intends to). A call to openness

1. Introduction: Religion and Spirituality

2. Jordan Peterson

3. Mental health, value system and political categories in crisis

4. Dialogue in critique of Western rationalism

5. Perón

6. Marx

7. On academia and science

8. Foucault

9. Kusch

10. Abram

11. Dussel

12. Closure: mi General, cuánto valés

Sometimes, on Sundays, we go to Mass with Marquitos. We’ve only crossed paths twice, but it’s become a ritual activity and a sign of our friendship. For my part, it’s more about not saying no to community practices that offer space for the transcendental than to saying yes to the Catholic Church and all that it entails.

1.

It’s both difficult and easy to understand spaces of meditation and prayer as sacred and to find much-needed silence in the noisy context in which we live. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily has to be found in Catholic Mass, but there seems to be a certain scandal in considering Mass, a resistance to the spiritual, not only present towards the Christian or Catholic faith, but also against almost all beliefs not based on science. I believe that the rejection of certain themes is not only linked to the historical corruption, oppression, and violence of – in this case – the Catholic Church but also complements and is sustained by a fear of rethinking and reconstructing what religion addresses (or tries to address).

Denying the existence of certain issues of humanity and reality has led us to construct knowledge in a fragmented, biased, and partial way, including the analysis of political phenomena. It is essential to build an understanding of religion as political and to analyze religion in the political. The Vatican, currently the oldest state in humanity, could not be the same if it were governed by a Latin American Pope, than if it were not. Even so, the Catholic Church in Latin America and in Argentina is not a homogeneous whole. As Löwy (1999) explains, there is a conflict between what the author calls “progressive Christians and conservative Christians.” In The Caliban and the Witch (Federici, 2004)  it is explained how the extermination of witches had significant relevance in the formation of nation-states and the capitalist system, Weber’s contribution regarding the connection between Protestantism and capitalism, became indeed a classical in social theory curricula. It would be foolish to suggest that these are unimportant matters, they deserve to be included as an essential factor to have into consideration for a coherent analysis. Historical events that link politics and religion and should be addressed and studied. So far, nothing controversial.

Well, discussing the relationship between spirituality and politics seems to be a little more scandalous. Perhaps I say this because I was not raised in a Catholic environment and I did not have any religious training or spiritual influence. In my journey through the academic universe, I consider this to be something that is not addressed enough, or with the necessary depth, at least in the literature of my undergraduate degree, to give an example.

2.

However, denying what we don’t understand, as Peterson (2017) says, makes us even more irrational precisely from the false pretense of rationality. Denying the inexplicable is even more absurd than assuming that reason does not encompass everything that reality implies. Conservative psychologist Jordan Peterson has undoubtedly learned to recognize the needs of his time, being a popular and influential academic with millions of followers worldwide. The author postulates that since Nietzsche enunciated the phrase “God is dead,” Western humanity has been in a state of destabilization due to the lack of an ideal (God) and an integrated system of beliefs and representations. According to Peterson (2017), the current tragedy is the lack of a system of values that gives meaning to life and motivates good. He argues that reason cannot, or rather has failed, to be the sole realm of knowledge construction because our conscious thought is “embedded” in an environment of existentialist issues that human reason cannot explain.

3.

The consequence of the crisis that Peterson analyzes is a society in mental health crisis with levels of intolerance on a scale. According to surveys by the Pan American Health Organization in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO & PAHO, 2022), mental disorders are among the top five causes of disease in the Americas. In 2018, the “Epidemiological Study of Mental Health in the General Population of the Argentine Republic” was carried out within the framework of the World Mental Health Survey Initiative (WHO/Harvard), in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires and the Association of Psychiatrists. The results of the study indicate that 29.1% of the Argentine population suffers from mental disorders, with anxiety, depression, and substance abuse being the most common.

Simultaneously with the crisis of values and ideals, traditional currents of Western ideological thought are in crisis, faced with the inability to categorize governments, administrations, opinions, events… as right or left. The cultural and social questioning that mobilizes the foundations of what is politically considered conservative, progressive, left, and right has generated several political characters that force academics and thinkers to redefine the categories with which political phenomena are interpreted. From the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States, a conservative protectionist, to the president-elect in Argentina, Javier Milei, an anarcho-libertarian, opposed to abortion. The variables of categories considered as exclusive (left-right) have entered into crisis, at the same time that the international geopolitical system is in transition towards an uncertain destiny. 

4.

It is for this reason that it is interesting to include in this writing an open dialogue with contributions from authors even if they have a controversial ideological position. The production of knowledge should not be censored by politically correct guidelines. On the contrary, this present is an opportunity to enrich points of view between those who disagree. It could be considered a fertile period to enable political debates that are creative and not restrictive, that allow new categories to emerge in the face of those that are already obsolete and that generate deep polarization. It is essential to soften the scale of intolerance and violence in the face of the wear and tear of traditional channels of political participation in the West.

Western rationalism, which has colonized and continues to colonize peoples, is in a psychological and spiritual crisis. This aspect must be considered key, since thinking about politics implies thinking about people and relationships, and above all, the common goals that an organized community can pursue. Peterson’s contribution as a psychology researcher is considered valuable, as it seems politically incorrect to postulate the need to reposition reason, especially in the academic university setting.

All is, without the need to despise reason or discredit the knowledge and development that it has made possible, but rather to reclaim everything that makes up reality and needs to be integrated to ensure truly transformative thinking.

5.

Perón begins “The Organized Community” by declaring: “Man and society are facing the deepest crisis of values that their evolution has ever recorded” (Perón, 1949). This important writing of Peronist doctrine argues that practical materialism was not accompanied by a preparation of the human spirit; and that:

It is possible that the action of thought has in recent times lost direct contact with the realities of the lives of peoples. It is also possible that the cultivation of great truths, the tireless pursuit of ultimate reasons, has turned a science that is abstract and teaching by nature into a technical virtuosity, with the consequent distancing from the perspective in which man usually develops (Perón, 1949).

The General argues that it is necessary to build a significant ethical education in the face of the era of the preponderance of reason, initiated by Descartes, to overcome disenchantment, existentialist Nausea, Heideggerian anguish. He not only observes a technical knowledge divorced from the lives of peoples, but criticizes the “un-graded leap” from rigorous idealism, faith, and obedience to utilitarian materialism, opinion, and unconditionality. The progress of practical materialism has reduced the intimate perspectives of man, and spiritual progress is need with urgence, the construction of a solid truth that includes the inexplicable. It is not possible, the General will say, to discard metaphysical thought without constructing a new scale of values, a new morality that allows the construction of virtue: understanding of one’s own personality and the surrounding environment that defines relationships and obligations, “human virtue that does not condemn sacred rebellions and that puts an unbreakable wall against disorder” (Perón, 1949).

This, in turn, presents a critique of Marxist thought, opening a question about these matters in front of positivism, materialism, and, at the end of the day inevitable, eurocentrism.

6.

Marx has been widely read for his critics on the philosophical, political, and economic thought of his time. In a just search to critique German idealism, he battles against it, arguing that it is necessary to study reality, specific subjects in a specific historical moment and context. This implies a strong critique of religion. The author argues, referring to his historical period of course, that society exists arbitrarily, based on precepts – religious – that justify a miserable world, in which reality is softened, preventing the realization of human essence, which therefore lacks true reality. Religion is necessary because without it, true misery manifests itself. It is itself a protest since it is created for a situation that needs illusions to create joy. Religion is nothing more than “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, because it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. Religion is the opium of the people” (Marx, 1982: 491).

Marx accompanies his critique of the religion of his time with an analysis of the alienation of people in the capitalist system. On the one hand, the author argues that the working class, the laborer, is reduced to a commodity, as the demand for it is regulated according to the need of the ‘rich’s whim.’ If the supply of workers is greater than the demand, they are subject to begging and/or death, that is, the production of workers is regulated in the same way as any other commodity: these increasingly harassed legions of workers do not even have the peace of mind of always finding employment; the industry that has brought them together only lets them live when it needs them; as soon as it can do without them, it abandons them to their fate without the slightest consideration; and the workers are forced to surrender their persons and energies in exchange for the price that they are willing to offer (Marx, 1982: 570).

The individual worker becomes an object that is subordinate to the need for labor of the capitalist in an unequal way in terms of power, since the capitalist has greater independence from the worker, since he can survive without him, either by finding another or by making use of his accumulated appropriated labor – his capital. The working individual must sell his own humanity, while in the landed class, they constitute themselves as privileged and idle gods who impose and dictate their laws.

This situation deepens with the division of labor, as the worker becomes more dependent on his work. Tasks, in turn, become mechanical, which generates physical and spiritual degradation. Added to the existing competitiveness among workers is the competition of machines, exacerbated by the increase in mechanical means of production generated by the accumulation of capital. The class that has its labor power and lacks accumulated labor, is subjected to worsening living conditions even when society is prosperous:

While the division of labor increases the productivity of the worker, the wealth and refinement of society, impoverishes the workers, making them descend to the level of machines. While the division of labor causes the accumulation of capital, and with it, a growing prosperity of society, it increasingly places the worker under the dependence of the capitalist, imposes on him an ever-increasing competition, and pushes him into the vertigo of overproduction, followed by the subsequent depression (Marx, 1982: 564).

The life of the worker is shortened as he must sacrifice his time and renounce his freedom to obtain a higher wage, on which his physical existence depends: “this class must continuously sacrifice a part of itself in order not to perish completely” (Marx, 1982: 561).

Marx problematizes the physical and spiritual degradation that occurs in people within the capitalist system. The spiritual crisis seems to be contemplated in relation to the production system; from rationalism to resist the despotism of the Church, and from materialism to critique German idealism.

7.

We could say that Perón’s very accurate observation about Western rationalism allows us to analyze the present, providing tools to name what is taboo? denied? ignored? The rationalist characteristic of the French Enlightenment and Eurocentrism that strips us out of the search proposed by Perón is particularly present in the academic sphere. It is an urgent responsibility of the academic-scientific community to carry out a meta-analysis on this, an extensive debate pending, without due attention. Knowledge must be rigorous, but also innovative, creative, and not in function of the technical but of social justice and political sovereignty. This does not only happen in the field of Social Sciences, but also in the Natural Sciences, since there is a movement of doctors, physicists and chemists who question the contemporary scientific system and its positivist materialist postulates (García, 2020).

8.

The construction of scientific knowledge and the validation of professional and trade knowledge are necessary and valuable tools. However, as Foucault expresses it, there is what can be considered “returns of knowledge,” an insurrection of subjugated knowledges: “knowledges that were disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges below the level of scientific knowledge demanded (Foucault, 2000).” These knowledges include those of the people and are anchored in the local, the regional. It refers to memory, and the use of the historical knowledge of struggles in current tactics. It is an opposition between: “local knowledges, discontinuous, disqualified, not legitimized, against the unitary theoretical instance that seeks to filter them, hierarchize them, order them in the name of true knowledge, in the name of the rights of a science that some would possess (Foucault, 2000)”.  According to the author, these disqualified knowledges that reappear give rise to criticism, from the insurrection of knowledges, not necessarily against the contents, methods or concepts of a science, but against the effects of centralizing power linked to the institution and functioning of an organized scientific discourse. However, it is valid to partially disagree with this assumption, since there is not a disappearance and reappearance of knowledges, they have always been present to a greater or lesser degree of oppression, invisibilization, stigmatization. It is in these moments of crisis of Western rationalist knowledge that these local knowledges acquire greater force in the face of a hegemonic status quo, and provide a sovereign alternative to social movements and peoples.

9.

Kusch, an Argentine anthropologist, postulated the existence of a denied part of the American being by technology, and constructs a symbolic opposition between cleanliness and stench in America to explain it:

on the stench of America and on the anxious cleanliness, there is implicit the desire to cover up an anger that no one wants to see. At stake is a primary issue that man has always needed but that the shell of progressivism of our citizens and intellectuals – progressivism nourished almost exclusively by 19th-century bourgeois Europe – tries to keep at bay (Kusch, 1999).

The historical process of displacing priests by technicians, characteristic of science in Western modernity, generates, according to the author, a material security that is superficial, which does not manage to include intimacy and prayer. The factory replaces the church and technology imposes itself without a morality to accompany it: “the atomic bomb has already revealed the immoral basis on which technology is based (Kusch, 1999).” This process, accompanied by the loss of man as a biological entity, man is alone, without God and without world, behind the walled city and objects, losing the sense of a simple life without merchandise. Technology develops without a why. Meanwhile, it is applied in the face of the predictable, “a soft universe, already conquered, that does not completely coincide with the cosmos (Kusch, 1976).” In this sense, academic sterility is linked to the fear of the middle classes to venture out into the street (Kusch, 1976), the uncertain, what technology cannot control, what science cannot explain.

Subjugated knowledges and our American stench effectively resist what tries to impose reason as absolute and superior. Recognizing this implies an openness to planes that have been historically relegated, and it is worth insisting, by a colonial system that imposes French enlightenment, capitalist, bourgeois and patriarchal adulthood.

10.

A common search of the reviewed authors is the reference to everyday life. A repositioning of reason, in the context of the unexpected, uncertain, emotional and organic of life, society, existence.

The living world, -that ambiguous reality that we experience between pains and joys, between mourning and love, is at the same time the ground in which our beliefs take root, and the rich humus to which their results eventually return, either in the form of nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, laden with its own subjective, emotional and intuitive content, therefore continues to be the dark and vital territory of all our objectivity.

Even so, this territory is largely ignored or unrecognized by scientific culture. In a society that primarily gives importance to the predictable and rewards certainty, our spontaneous and preconceptual experience, if it manages to be perceived, does not deserve any consideration other than being merely “subjective”. The fluid realm of direct experience has come to be seen as a secondary and derivative dimension, as a mere consequence of the events that occur in the “real” world of quantifiable scientific “facts”. This is a curious inversion of the actual and demonstrable state of affairs. Subatomic quanta today deserve the consideration of being more primordial and “real” than the world we experience every day with our senses. The living, sentient and thinking organism is considered to derive, somehow, from that mechanical body whose reflexes and systems have been measured and mapped. The living person thus becomes an epiphenomenon of the anatomized body. The fact that it is precise living and sentient beings, complete with all their enigmatic emotions and unpredictable passions, to come to conceive of these subatomic fields, or to dissect and map this human body, is easily overlooked or dismissed as insubstantial (Abram, 1996).

In the theorization of the break in the relationship between humanity and non-human nature, which refers to a disconnection from the natural and the care of the biodiversity that contains us, the anthropologist Abram (1996) analyzes structural changes and links them to the emergence of an alphabet of abstract symbols. Having no reference to the living world, losing all earthly and extraliterary meaning, in contrast to the oral literary tradition, and/or ideographic and pictographic alphabets, the anima of the air is lost in the narrative.

It is tempting to think that the same thing may have happened with the financialization of the world’s economies and capitals, detaching itself in a way that is harmful to humanity, from the true structure of production and exchange, above all, of supply, as a social function of the economy, which of course is not sustainable without certain political and social agreements.

11.

Nature, our own cultural identity and subjectivity; and now even the system of production and supply, are positioned as others in the face of the destructive logics of modern capitalism that have managed to impose themselves by force. From the perspective of Dussel (2022), considering reason in terms of modernity implies a notion of the maturity of humanity acquired through reason, on the one hand, and an irrational praxis of violence on the part of “superior” modern society, on the other. Only through the liberation of the denied otherness can a project of liberation be carried forward. The Others, en-covered by the discovery of America, the “faces,” historical subjects, oppressed who have been excluded from hegemonic communication. The need to recognize colonial practices that perpetuate the oppression of everything that is not based on science and reason in the countries of Latin America, including the Argentine Nation. It is in this sense that it is interesting to deconstruct, responsibly and carefully, the ways in which the imposition of rational knowledge as the ultimate and absolute, exclusive and stigmatizing of popular knowledge that constructs a kinder reality. This is particularly relevant considering the context of the crisis previously discussed.

12.

To conclude, I will revisit Perón’s reflection, as an aid in times of spiritual, psychological, economic, and political crisis: the ultimate sense of the ethics we seek must be the correction of selfishness, defined as the absence of values and the overestimation of one’s own interests. Compassion for the situation that a person who wishes to exercise her right to autonomy over her own body goes through, beyond her own assumptions and dogmas. Solidarity with our people in the struggle for an inclusive national project that is not indifferent to people who are excluded from the system. Egoism, says Perón, is like cold, the absence of something, and we battle by strengthening the ethical vision that the organized community is the ultimate meaning of human life (Perón, 1949).

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