Tag Archives: Karl Marx

A Further Sojourn Into Hannah Arendt’s Prophetic Work

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I continue to explore the work of Hannah Arendt from which I shared in in recent posts.  And, from this blog-o-sphere that I participate in I have received nice feedback as well from friends I know in real-time.  Arendt’s work details how the absence of critical thinking will leave one mired down in the unacknowledged recesses of the mind and heart.  This venture into the heart’s machinations is disillusioning and frightening. Arendt offers us a powerful exploration of totalitarianism and its impact, individually and collectively on critical thinking. Without it a mind-set emerges and marches on, grim faced and determined to cling to preconceptions and biases that harm themselves and others, lacking any “interior dialogue” or self-talk.

In my morning sojourn through the cyber world today, I discovered related wisdom that I would like to share.  The first is from Gene W. Marshall in his book “Jacob’s Dream,” in which he writes from what I would describe as a post-modern view of Holy Writ:

Spirit freedom is not the same thing as the so-called free will that is often written about. The ego (as I have defined it) has free will but the ego’s definition of free will is limited by the ego’s definition of itself.  The ego is a construction of the human mind.  This construction may allow for the presence of some elements of our essential Freedom.  But because it is a human construction, the ego also restricts the full expression of our Spirit Freedom. (As I noted in last week’s blog, “We want only what we want.” and cannot see beyond our narcissistic view of the world. “The world is my oyster”!)

Here, Mr. Marshall’s thought leads us directly into the abyss that I shared from Arendt’s observations about Hitler and totalitarianism.  My vein of thought was very convoluted and even involuted as I tried to put into words that which cannot be put into words. This effort can take us into a murky world which is very “Zen like,” a state of being which I used to formulate in terms of “the working of the Holy Spirit.” And this biblical formulation still has merit for me.  The Apostle Paul described this process as the “Spirit” furrowing into the depths of our heart where we can “discern the thoughts and intents” of our heart, individually and collectively. (I recall a note by Rumi pointing this truth out in 13th century Iran, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”)

In the on-line journal, “The Mind Matters” I also discovered this morning a paragraph from Andre Gorz that is relevant:

For society is no longer to be found where it institutionally proclaims its existence…Society now only exists in the interstices of the system, where new relations and new solidarities are being worked out and are creating, in their turn, new public spaces in the struggle against the mega-machine and its ravages; it exists only where individuals assume the autonomy to which the disintegration of traditional bonds and the bankruptcy of received interpretations condemn them and where they take upon themselves the task of inventing, starting out from their own selves, the values, goals and social relations which can become the seeds of a future society.”

Gorz, who was a Marxist philosopher, captured the dynamic dimension of a social body and described bringing it to life, paralleling the process of a“human body”…an individual… self-reflect ing itself into “coming to life.” His term, the “interstices of the system” in sociological thought parallels our own individual heart in which components are roiling about in an effort to come to grips with our interior life, aka those “thoughts and intents of the heart’ that the Apostle Paul wrote about. This process can produce “life”, aka “Life” that is beyond the pale of the perfunctory life that our world offered us as a child. This makes me want to scrutinize further the bromide from my youth, “being born again.””

I know that my thoughts here are again convoluted and involuted.  I am trying to summarize that life is more than we know it to be.  I am more than I “think” that I am and I live in a world which is more than it “thinks” it is.  I am exploring a dimension of life that is mysterious and incomprehensible.  I can never “figger it out,” I can only pay attention to what is going on in my heart and what is “going on” out there as I “chop wood and carry water” for another day. Presently, I can only “pay attention” to the glory of a beautiful doggie lying here beside me, the cup of coffee I’m sipping, and the crackling of the fire in the wood stove. Shortly, the morning will begin to dawn and I will saunter outside into the cool of the morning air, pay homage to the plants and flowers that are thriving, and bow before the majestic tapestry of morning stars that linger before disappearing for another day. One poet described this as the mystery before which we can only, “glory, bow, and tremble.”

 

Vulnerability, Faith, and “Opiate of the Masses”

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Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, observed in his book, “The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language” that self-awareness is a very subtle and  often misunderstood phenomenon.  According to him, “Imagining that we have arrived at a satisfactory level of self understanding is clear indication that we have not in the least.”

Self-understanding is the process of becoming conscious.  And this is a task that we never finish completely though it is so comfortable to convince ourselves that it is.  The resulting certainty allows us to function in the smoothly-oiled social machinery of day to day life but only at the cost noted by W. H. Auden, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  At some point in life we need to be able to challenge the smug certainties that we are ensconced in and tippy-toe into the risky domain of faith where we deal with the vulnerability that makes us human.  Otto Brown noted, “To be, is to be vulnerable” and until we have learned to live with some degree of vulnerability we have not become human. But use of this word “faith” is risky territory as it brings to mind religion and often there lies one of the most pernicious traps available to mankind.  For, “god” which often is the key figure in faith can often be merely another escape, a veritable opiate as in Karl Marx’s observation, “Religion is the opiate of the masses”

John Masefield, Stanley Kunitz, and “Continuity of Being”

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John Masefield, the British poet laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967, is now running a close second to Shakespeare as my favorite sonneteer. He was a bookish lad, an addiction which his aunt, his guardian when his parents died in his childhood, sought to break by sending him to sea at age 13. But he there found lots of time to read and to write without the interference of the unappreciated aunt and also developed a lifetime passion for the maritime life. “Sea-Farer” is one of his best known poems and the sea, and water themes, are common in his work.

His adventures at sea, including the foreign lands he visited, gave him a global approach to life and made him an observer of the human situation which is a gift many poets have. In the following sonnet, he started with a line about the ephemeral nature of identity itself, noting a wish to “get within this changing I, this ever-altering thing which yet persists…” Masefield’s natural curiosity and educational accomplishments helped him see life as every bit turbulent and capricious as the sea, always changing yet persisting nevertheless.
Modern life in the late 19th century (he was born in 1878) was teeming with scientific discoveries and theories, including the work of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. To those exposed to higher education, life was not a static phenomenon but a dynamic process and even one’s own identity was an evolutionary process. But later in the sonnet he did recognize a “ghost in the machine” which some of us like to describe as “god” (i.e. “God”) which appeared often to be effecting some direction to the caprices of our day to day life. Even “in the brain’s most enfolded twisted shell,” he saw, “The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell” providing some mysterious teleology to our often-mischievous path. This notion brings to mind one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare, “There is a Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”
If I could get within this changing I,
This ever altering thing which yet persists,
Keeping the features it is reckoned by,
While each component atom breaks or twists,
If, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms,
Cells at their hidden marvels hard at work,
Pale from much toil, or red from sudden storms,
I might attain to where the Rulers lurk.
If, pressing past the guards in those grey gates,
The brain’s most folded intertwisted shell,
I might attain to that which alters fates,
The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell,
Then, on Man’s earthly peak, I might behold
The unearthly self beyond, unguessed, untold.

Here I want to append an excerpt from another poem, by a United States poet laureate, Stanley Kunitz, entitled, “The Layers” in which he too recognized some mysterious “center” in the depth of one’s being from which one, “struggles not to stray” even in the infinite vicissitudes of life.

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.

Here is a list of my blogs. I invite you to check out the other two sometime.
https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/
https://literarylew.wordpress.com/
https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Jesus Said, “Let Go of Your Stuff!”

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My “literary license” has here been employed but I think that “let go of your stuff” is a good paraphrasing of the teachings of Jesus.  For example, this was conveyed in his observation that it would be easier for a rich man to enter the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven.  And in another place, he responded to a query re what one must do to have eternal life with the response, “Sell all that you have and give it to the poor.”  Now, I don’t think these words were to be taken literally but were merely his ways of pointing out how deeply attached humans are to their possessions, their “stuff.”  And his teaching that we find our self only in losing our self is another example of the same them.  This detachment from the material world was, and is, a motif in Eastern spiritual teachings as eastern thought reveals less of an investment in the object world.

 

In my culture, interpreting the teachings of Jesus as “Let go of your stuff” would real ring dissonant with most people.  For, we are very attached to our “stuff” and attached to such a degree that we can’t understand the notion.  Asking anyone to see this attachment is like asking a fish to see water.  And this attachment issue also pertains to spirituality for in the West we tend to approach faith as just another item in the category of “stuff” and so we glom onto it and proceed to exploit the hell out of it just as if it were like any of the rest of the “stuff” that we are so attached to.  And, in most cases it is!  And this is actually just a form of addiction and even if the object of our addiction….the substance is something purportedly noble…it is still an “addictive substance” in our case and thus is used to avoid reality.  And this is the reason that so much of modern day religion appears to be absurd to anyone with a capacity for critical thought as they can readily see that it has nothing to do with anything other than practitioner himself.  This is what Karl Marx had in mind when he described religion as “the opiate of the masses.”

 

Shakespeare understood this sin of misplaced concreteness so well, that sin of taking for real that which is only ephemeral.  He saw that our investment in “stuff” reflected a disregard for our subjective experience…our heart…in preference for an inordinate investment in the object world.  His conclusion was “within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Here is the entire Shakespearean Sonnet:

 

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array?
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opiate of the Masses

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Karl Marx famously noted that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  O’Bama had this notion in mind four years ago when he was unwittingly heard referring to some people who “cling to their guns and religion.”

Well, I agree but with qualification.  First, re the gun issue, yes there are some whose identity is too wrapped up in gun ownership and they make things look bad for men who own guns but have a life outside of gun ownership.  The latter aren’t nuts. Likewise with religion, there are those who use religion obsessively to cover up an impoverished identity and often they end up as certifiable nuts.

But the problem here is not guns or religion.  The problem is an impoverished identity which often does cross over into mental illness.

But my main focus here is religion.  There is so much insanity that surfaces in religion and it is so easy to throw the baby out with the bath water.  I do think religious people should give Marx’s observation attention for religion…yes, even yours and mine…does have an opiate dimension.  And that is not the fault, necessarily, of the religion we practice or believe in.  It is the fault of our human nature which tends to take ourselves too seriously and tends to interpret religious teachings in a self-serving manner. And when this tendency runs unchecked, lunacy will likely ensue.  Case in point—Westboro Baptist Church and Islamic Extremists.