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Maoist movie reviews
"Angels & Demons" and the unconscious influence of Catholic
epistemology in alleged Marxism
Angels & Demons
Directed by Ron Howard
Starring Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor and Ayelet Zurer
Rated PG-13
138 minutes
2009
Reviewed August 2009
[spoilers]
Simulation
of plasma turbulence in a tokamak
Interacting galaxies
"The splendor of truth shines forth in all the works of the
Creator and, in a special way, in man, created in the image and
likeness of God. . . . no darkness of error or of sin can
totally take away from man the light of God the Creator. In the
depths of his heart there always remains a yearning for absolute
truth and a thirst to attain full knowledge of it." --John Paul
II, Veritatis splendor
" . . . when the Scholastics, following the opinion of the holy
Fathers, always held in anthropology that the human intelligence
is only led to the knowledge of things without body and matter
by things sensible, they well understood that nothing was of
greater use to the philosopher than diligently to search into
the mysteries of nature and to be earnest and constant in the
study of physical things." --Leo XIII, "Aeterni Patris"
"Human beings are created in the imago Dei precisely as
persons capable of a knowledge and love that are personal and
interpersonal. It is of the essence of the imago Dei in
them that these personal beings are relational and social
beings, embraced in a human family whose unity is at once
realized and prefigured in the Church." --"Communion and
Stewardship"
"Philosophy has reached a point when the trivial fact of the
necessity of intercourse between human beings -- a fact without
a knowledge of which the second generation that ever existed
would never have been produced, a fact already involved in the
sexual difference -- is presented by philosophy at the end of
its entire development as the greatest result. . . . What this
"procreated" man does afterwards, apart from again "spiritually"
and "physically" "procreating men", is not mentioned."
--Friedrich Engels, "Feuerbach"
"Angels & Demons" revolves around a rogue conspiracy to generate
sympathy for the Roman Catholic Church by staging a fake Illuminati
attack against it and shore up divine revelation against a perceived
scientism of the Church's opponents. The conspiracy involves
dangerous material taken from a particle physics laboratory. One
physicist, Father Silvano, is a Catholic priest. The symbologist
character played by Tom Hanks anthropologizes/deconstructs
Christianity. "Angels & Demons" raises the topic of science
versus/vis-à-vis religion, whereas this reviewer would like to
discuss the difference between the Marxist attitude toward science
and a Catholic attitude toward science shared by apparent atheists.
Those familiar with both Catholicism and Toward a New Psychology of Women will notice that MIWS
does not go far enough in exposing Toward a New Psychology of
Women's Catholicism. It is just a matter of intellectual clarity;
obviously, the author passed away years ago, and it does not matter
in the least whether she ever identified as a Catholic or not. The
problem with most critical discussion of the Roman Catholic Church
today is that it does not address the Catholic Church's theology.
Consequently, many claiming not to be Catholic still have Catholic
ideas, including in the so-called communist movement. I have seen a
movie where a halfhearted Soviet revisionist is a crypto-Catholic,
which is supposed to redeem the revisionist. That movie is supposed
to be anti-communist, but unfortunately it is not far off the mark.
Readers may have noticed the presence of both Catholicism references
and Islam references in MIWS's work. MIWS speaks to an intellectual
audience that should develop familiarity with both. The point is not
that the Catholic Church or Islamic organizations are particularly in
need of opposition right now. On the contrary, Islam is playing a
role in the Third World that should belong to scientific communism,
but which scientific communism has failed to attain due to the
influence of pseudo-Marxism. In the case of the Catholic Church, the
Bill Maher/Christopher Hitchens/pseudo-Maoist tag team criticizes
religion in general in order to attack Islamic anti-Amerikans and the
masses in particular, while Catholic ideas remain in the Western
superstructure. Even in the United $tates, where the influence of the
Catholic Church organizationally is less than in other countries,
Catholic ideas may be found in the so-called communist movement. The
Catholic Church exerts considerable intellectual influence in the
world, and its ideas need to be dealt with frontally. Catholicism is
not something that can be handled just by talking about the Crusades,
the Inquisition, Christopher Columbus, Galileo (the treatment of whom
the Catholic Church has repented of, referenced in "Angels &
Demons"), Pope Pius XII, etc., or even discussing Vatican
anti-Communism or arguing against theism in general. Religious
institutions need to be understood sociologically, but ironically
opponents of the Catholic Church can do more than open Catholics to
spread confusion about Catholic ideas among the oppressed in these
opponents' focus on the Catholic Church as an organization while
Catholic ideas show up all over the place. The phenomenon of people
who have stopped going to Mass over the Catholic child sexual abuse
scandal, but remain ideologically Catholic (or became more purely
pragmatist-empiricist and subjectivist individualists and are
latently Catholic), is just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority
of people claiming to be non-Catholics in the West have not looked
Catholicism in the eye and gone through a process where they have
said, Sorry, Padre, but in my heart of hearts I'm not Catholic.
This is what I think you said; this is why I don't agree with it.
Going to infidels.org one day for a resentful, peevish or
self-indulgent reason and coming away thinking one is not a Christian
does not extricate oneself from Christian ideology permeating the
Western superstructure.
If a premise of "Angels & Demons" is that "Catholic natural
scientist" would be an oxymoron to a significant number of people in
the Holy See, that premise is based on ignorance. While appearing to
concede something to Catholicism by depicting a Catholic physicist,
"Angels & Demons" actually creates a false impression of Catholicism
that science does not fit in the Catholic conception of truth. There
is nothing controversial about being a Catholic biologist, or even
being an evolutionary biologist itself or a particle physicist. This
is not a trivial matter. If one does not understand Catholic
epistemology, he or she is not going to be able to deal with
manifestations of that in supposedly materialist communist movements.
"Angels & Demons" does a kind of service to Catholicism as an
ideology by misrepresenting what is going on in the Vatican
intellectually and allowing crypto-Catholicism to thrive in the place
of open Catholicism. "Angels & Demons" and particularly its prequel,
"The Da Vinci Code" (2006), may hurt open Catholicism -- hurting open
Catholicism may be useful for opposing struggles of the oppressed in
the Third World at this particular moment -- but Catholicism in
general will not be hurt. There is a weird situation where
crypto-Catholics are targeting the Catholic Church though the
Catholic Church is more correct than them on migrants, with whom the
Church does not emphasize labor aristocracy interests or solidarity
with the labor aristocracy in particular, and other questions (albeit
less correct than real Maoists), and spreading crypto-Catholicism and
illusions about the U.$. class structure cloaked in atheist and
Marxist rhetoric.
I can see how the stem cell controversy that involves science, not
just implementation, could be an inspiration behind "Angels &
Demons." Whether its reasons are correct or not, the Catholic Church
has particular reasons for opposing embryonic stem cell research that
have nothing to do with opposing science in general. (At least, the
Catholic Church is no more opposed to science than pseudo-Marxists
who place more importance on clinging to and spreading Valentine's
Day mumbo jumbo than facing the concrete reality of class. Raising
embryonic stem cells is a joke when the single most important factor
in the development of the planet Earth currently -- the global class
structure -- is ignored and deliberately obscured. Both open
Catholicism and pseudo-Marxism support science in words and speak of
truth-for-its-own-sake in such a way as to flatter the
petty-bourgeoisie. If the scientific interest of Catholicism is just
posturing, something designed in the last few decades to deceive, so
is the scientific interest of pseudo-Marxism: posturing.
Contrariwise, if the scientific pretension of pseudo-Marxism is to be
taken seriously, so must the scientific pretension of Catholicism.)
Comparisons of the Catholic Church to apocalyptic, anti-scientific,
Biblical-literalist organizations are mistaken. The idea of "leaving
no stone unturned," though sometimes used to justify the pursuit of
scientific results by any means, is actually found in Catholic
epistemology and method, not Marxist-Leninist-Maoist epistemology,
which is dialectical-materialist. "Leave no stone unturned" is closer
to contemplative materialism than it is to dialectical materialism.
The difference between contemplative materialism and dialectical
materialism is important, and only pseudo-Marxists, who may call
themselves "Maoist" and who may have always had problems with
dialectical materialism, would suggest that the difference is
unimportant. Even Catharine MacKinnon, who is not a Marxist, dealt
with contemplative materialism in Toward a Feminist Theory of the
State, as part of the process of developing a dynamical and
historical theory of gender (as opposed to just a set of complaints
or disparate and disjointed facts). (MacKinnon ultimately did not
produce that theory, but that's another matter.) Chalking up
discussions of contemplative materialism to some biographical quirk
of Karl Marx's or Friedrich Engels' won't penetrate the substance of
the issue.
Particle physics is reminiscent of one sense of "leave no stone
unturned" in that it evokes looking at things under increasing
magnification. Although, that does not really capture the methods of,
and directions in, particle physics, which is no longer concerned
with just looking for smaller and smaller particles and involves
experiments conducted outside small physics laboratories. Particle
physics is sometimes called "high-energy physics." The particle
accelerators at CERN, depicted in "Angels & Demons," are used for
high-energy physics research on different kinds of particles.
Particle physics experiments can take place in outer space. There are
antimatter-related experiments, to be conducted using a module on the
International Space Station, to look for antimatter in the universe.
Research on subatomic particles such as being done on antimatter is
not research on increasingly small particles per se. It should also
be noted that insights from particle physics have informed
understanding of macroscopic phenomena, in addition to involving and
being fertile ground for cosmological theorizing.
There is nothing wrong with particle physics or astrobiology for that
matter. To some extent, high-energy physics reflects the kind of
things Homo sapiens may do when everyone has more leisure time
and people aren't dying from exploitation. Bracketing questions
regarding fragmentation in science, at issue here is not the utility,
in terms of practicality as commonly understood, of natural science
or this or that field. Problems with contemplative materialism can be
seen at the level of science as a whole in the present-day world, as
well as within disciplines. If the top priority in a country is seen
as ending AIDS or poverty, and then an antimatter physicist in that
context tries to justify what he or she is doing by making reference
to the economic benefits, realized and conceived, of particle physics
research, there could be a form of contemplative materialism at work
there. Is there a correct relationship between reality and practice,
or is the physicist ignoring a social process already happening that
is helping to end AIDS? Antimatter research may be "practical," but
at this point in time where science is not yet under the control of
the oppressed, natural scientists (notwithstanding ethical
considerations that they make in doing their work in a militarist
imperialist country) in general actually should not try too much to
defend the practicality of their work. Natural scientists should just
report their results and let leaders -- yes, political leaders,
because those are the only leaders of classes -- decide their
usefulness. (Whether they know it or not, natural scientists already
accept the leadership of one class or another. If there is something
important bourgeois leaders aren't "getting," then it may be because
there is something wrong with bourgeois leaders.) It has to do with
giving social science more space. I refer to real social science, not
pie-in-the-sky crap like the "science," already shown to be futile,
of how to get the whole world to have First World living standards
without revolution. There is too much vague and utopian thinking,
legitimizing bourgeois dictatorship, about the potential for
"science" to be used to end global poverty, increase even the First
World's living standards, and support "democracy." Even how to
approach climate change science is not without problems. Before
Barack Obama's inauguration, MIWS wrote on a technocratic fascist
tendency among Obama supporters. There are Amerikans who think Obama
should do something to make the government work more "efficiently" on
the climate change issue and see nothing wrong with the idea of a
Democratic one-party system, with a kind of centralism, in an
imperialist country. The idea of applying knowledge to change the
world needs to be distinguished from technocracy.
In terms of thinking within individual disciplines, so-called social
science is arguably more guilty of contemplative materialism than
natural scientists. Contemplative materialism is rampant in Western
academic social science studying infinite facets of a phenomenon or
history with little sense of perspective and often no expectation of
change, or practical application, and is rampant as well in other
forms among "Marxists" claiming to be revolutionary activists. It may
seem strange to even raise the issue of contemplative materialism in
the context of natural scientists who may not even be claiming to
study a social institution or change society, and perhaps some would
argue that this writer incorrectly takes up Engels' view of
dialectics, but the point is that there are differences in method
between contemplative materialism and dialectical materialism, even
among those trying to change reality -- differences that cannot be
entirely explained by reference to empiricism, positivism,
pragmatism, or even mechanical materialism. There are some analogous
differences in natural science.(1) I
have no idea about the methodological details of the Alpha Magnetic
Spectrometer experiments, but presumably it would not add much
statistically speaking to have duplicate experiments running on
another station right next to the ISS. It could be an error of
contemplativeness not resulting in advance to have redundant
observations. Advancement is to be distinguished from simply taking a
stand. Taking a stand on a whole insect species is more advanced than
taking a stand on an individual insect, but even taking a stand on
every new insect species discovered is not necessarily connected to a
generalization or an improvement in explanation. Underlying
advancement in science are the concrete contradictions of wholes and
the real dialectical relationships between objects, and between
individuals (in a non-humanist sense) and universals. A superior
method to that involved in studying an additional insect species
could be had with studying the internal contradictions of a
population of an insect species and its relationships with other,
non-insect species in a local ecology. It is not enough to change
reality by doing an experiment, as one might change the trajectory or
state of a particle in outer space through the operation of a
detector. Science should produce theories and eventually theories of
concrete dialectical processes; science should be oriented toward
human social practice.
Social science is often represented to be a study of endless
complexity, even apart from post-structuralism, complexity that may
include change but is historically static, or dynamic but lawless.
Everything may be seen as determining everything, with nothing in
particular being determinant. One tendency is to remain at a level of
description oriented toward political correctness refinement:
pointing out what is "racist," "classist," etc., but not locating it
concretely in a developing historical process. Some natural science
fields may seem to lend themselves uniquely to statistics and
controlled experiments, but the conception of society as a mess of
disparate phenomena and instances with no general order and
development is a conception of society -- a false one, but a
particular materialist one -- that Marx and Engels had to overcome.
It had to be overcome not for an instrumentalist reason of needing a
better conception in order to make a utopically imagined
"revolution," but because it was unreal. Marx and Engels saw
struggles happening shaking the whole of society. Contemplative
materialists saw development (as did Hegelians), but they conceived
of it in a particular way, which ignored class struggle and the
dominance of the economic substructure. To Marx and Engels, questions
about the individual and society in the abstract were inadequate, and
so were questions about a plurality of individuals. In connection to
this, they developed a certain outlook and recognized a method.
Marxism entails investigation. However, "do yet another area
investigation," "perform yet another observation," "read yet another
biography of someone in the CPSU" and "study yet another individual"
-- at some point these become passive contemplation, no matter how
much legwork seems to be involved.(2)
Where Catholicism comes in most conspicuously is "talk with yet
another individual." There is not a certain number of experiments,
observations or individuals that will lead to advance in all
situations, but people need to understand in principle what
contemplative materialism is, or they will become paralyzed and lost
in opportunism and utopianism.
This is not about politeness. One can be polite to white people and
even do kind things for them without practicing contemplative
materialism where one talks with white people endlessly in a search
for Neo or looking for pockets of fantastic exploitation supposedly
disproving the thesis that the First World white working class as a
whole does not produce surplus value. This is exactly what phony
Marxists who aren't consciously lying are doing in looking for a
vehicle for change in Euro-Amerika. The idea that a whole group of
people who are bourgeois may need to be violently defeated is beyond
these pseudo-Marxists, as it is beyond Catholics, because a notion of
communion with one's neighbors is denying advance. This has to do
with more than "love your neighbor" or "love your enemy," but what
the source of knowledge is more generally. Some believe that as long
as one is doing investigation or talking with others one is not a
contemplative materialist or idealist, but this represents a narrow
view of idealism. When Engels said in "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End
of Classical German Philosophy" that Feuerbach produced "thoughts out
of his solitary head instead of in amicable and hostile encounters
with other men of his caliber," that did not mean those who were more
extroverted and hands-on could not be idealist. A misinterpretation
of "social practice" in Marxism and "leave no stone unturned" as the
road to truth can lead to Catholicism in practice -- the specific
ideas "God" and "Mary" not being particularly relevant here -- and
tolerance of reactionary First World classes including the labor
aristocracy. Tolerance of the labor aristocracy may then become a
basis of an idealist and anti-proletarian ideology.
Textually, contemporary contemplative materialism may find
inspiration in the Hebrew Bible. For example, the poem that is
chapter 28 of the Book of Job contains (Revised Standard Version
Catholic Edition):
"Surely there is a mine for silver,
and a place for gold which they refine.
Iron is taken out of the earth,
and copper is smelted from the ore.
Men put an end to darkness,
and search out to the farthest bound
the ore in gloom and deep darkness.
They open shafts in a valley away from where men live;
they are forgotten by travelers,
they hang afar from men, they swing to and fro.
As for the earth, out of it comes bread;
but underneath it is turned up as by fire.
Its stones are the place of sapphires,
and it has dust of gold.
. . .
"Whence then comes wisdom?
And where is the place of understanding?
. . .
"God understands the way to it,
and he knows its place.
For he looks to the ends of the earth,
and sees everything under the heavens.
When he gave to the wind its weight,
and meted out the waters by measure;
when he made a decree for the rain,
and a way for the lightning of the thunder;
then he saw it and declared it;
he established it, and searched it out.
And he said to man,
'Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
and to depart from evil is understanding.'"
In the unabridged poem, a distinction is suggested between humans and
non-human animals, and the implication is that humans are able to
know nature in a way that non-human animals cannot -- a materialist
precept, but one that Marx and Engels went beyond. (Likewise, Marx
and Engels did not confine themselves to the idea that nature existed
before humans.) The connection to Catholicism lies in that Job 28:8
(the last verse of the chapter regarding fear of God and avoidance of
evil) would need to be interpreted in light of Jesus' revelation and
the Roman Catholic concept of the "image of God" involving the
capacity of everyone to know the truth in a limited, but expansive
way and imitate God. Fear of God provides an initial orientation and
it is not that people are now permitted to sin, but now emphasis may
shift to comprehending God intellectually as individuals, guided by a
church. God, not the earth, is the ultimate source of wisdom, but
God's expectations of humans have changed (and been heightened) since
Jesus' resurrection and the completion of his definitive revelation.
Revelation is complete, but continues to be mysterious, and the
mystery is to be comprehended by humans made newly free by Jesus'
passion and resurrection. The first verses of the poem in Job
acknowledge an existing intellectual practice, however rudimentary,
and the second half of the poem presents a vision of knowledge to
which humans may aspire, knowledge that is both a condition of, and
contingent on, "wisdom." Obviously, most self-identified "Marxists"
would disclaim Catholicism, and verbally they may not be Catholic,
but what is important is whether a given theory and practice is
objectively Catholic. Catholicism may be stripped of its theology and
ritual minutiae, but its ideological essence and corresponding
practice in specific domains may be retained. The mining references
in Job may just be examples of things and their obscured sources,
mining not being particularly important, so it is ironic that most
Western scientists, though studying things some or all of which they
may see as interconnected and dynamic, fundamentally treat science in
a way much akin to mining: an acquisition of things that may be
deposited in storage, every nugget and speck of equal measure of
equal value, sitting in nooks and crannies to be discovered. Sirach
1:9-10: "The Lord himself created wisdom; he saw her and apportioned
her, he poured her out upon all his works. She dwells with
all flesh according to his gift, and he supplied her to those who
love him." (emphasis added)
It could be raised that there is polytheistic idolatry of First World
productive forces, U.$. currency, Apple Inc. products, YouTube, and
Lady Gaga, that this idolatry is found among those whom this writer
is calling crypto-Catholic pseudo-Marxists, so how can one speak of
Christianity; Christianity is supposed to be monotheistic. Yet, by
some standards, almost all Amerikan "Christians," including
"Catholics," are polytheists. When polytheism is inserted into
"Marxism," the result is polytheism made militant, with Catholicism
as one possible glue besides a general liberalism. Polytheism is
found within Catholicism itself. Wanting to strike a
balance/synthesis between idolatrous contemplation of nature and
egoism, Feuerbach raises in The Essence of Christianity,
referring to Solomon of the Book of Wisdom, that the origin of
contemplation of nature is polytheism. " . . . science, like art,
arises only out of polytheism, for polytheism is the frank, open,
unenvying sense of all that is beautiful and good without
distinction, the sense of the world, of the universe." (p. 114) "The
heathens were idolaters, that is, they contemplated Nature; they did
nothing else than what the profoundly Christian nations do at this
day when they make Nature an object of their admiration, of their
indefatigable investigation." (p. 116) With the spread of
Christianity to other nations and adjustment to capitalism,
contemporary Christianity is arguably more polytheistic than early
Christianity. The polytheism of contemporary Christianity is a
polytheism with increasingly little benefit. If polytheism was
necessary to overcome feudalism as Feuerbach suggests, nonetheless
feudalism is mostly gone today and polytheism takes the form of an
obsolete, contemplative materialism, egoism, nationalism, and
historical idealism, which in the First World lead nowhere or
backward. Christian polytheism/pseudo-monotheism is at home amid the
militant nationalism, parasitism and racism of many First World
pseudo-Marxists, who are actually fascists.
Another question regards how contemplative materialists end up in
Catholicism. Most Westerners who end up in "science" were trained in
contemplative materialism since school. The problem with Feuerbach is
not that he had no idea humans changed nature and society. It's that
he did not see the relationship between the world and human knowledge
thereof, and social practice as it actually was. This was accompanied
by a fundamentally metaphysical view of matter and a contemplative
approach to things in general. One could argue that failure to
implement dialectical materialism leads to polytheism. Marx said that
the "highest point" attained by contemplative materialism was
"contemplation of single individuals and of civil society." "Highest
point" may be understood to mean as good as possible under a
restrictive outlook. Analogously, those with a geocentric view of the
universe -- to whom "Angels & Demons" refers indirectly -- gave
predicting the motion of celestial bodies their best shot with
epicycles and deferents under the constraint of geocentrism. They
were able to make some predictions with limited accuracy. But, what
they were doing was fraught with contradiction. Contemplative
materialists see change in society and make predictions, but they
have an easier time making predictions about things that they
isolate, and their predictions are contradictory, disjointed, or so
lacking in concreteness as to be uninformative. Confronting this
hodgepodge and soggy discharge, some contemplative materialists yearn
for unity. (John Paul II responds to this in "Fides et ratio":
"Perspectives on life and the world, often of a scientific temper,
have so proliferated that we face an increasing fragmentation of
knowledge. This makes the search for meaning difficult and often
fruitless. Indeed, still more dramatically, in this maelstrom of data
and facts in which we live and which seem to comprise the very fabric
of life, many people wonder whether it still makes sense to ask about
meaning.") The result is generalizations and predictions encompassing
everything or everyone under the sun (generalizations and predictions
that minimize class struggle in capitalist society -- attempts to
make sense out of and relate all information accumulated up to a
point that had not been produced using dialectical materialism), and
idealism. Contemplative materialism may have been an advance at one
point, but no longer. Contemplative materialists may end up in
Catholicism (more so because contemporary Catholicism incorporates
contemplative materialism). The Catholic Church raises ultimate truth
as a goal and then encourages people to take epistemological comfort
in individuals, the self, the Magisterium, and philosophy. The
standpoint of the Catholic Church's critique of relativism and of its
approach to information overload is a truth separate from class
practice.
Of course, not all pesudo-Marxists denying the existence of unequal
exchange, super-profit, and the labor aristocracy, as they concretely
are were ever scientists in any sense. However, there are a various
ways of considering the relationship between Catholicism,
contemplative materialism, and pseudo-Marxism, two of these being the
movement from apolitical contemplative materialism to Catholicism,
and the influence of Catholicism among contemplative materialists in
carrying out contemplative materialism. The Father Silvano character
in "Angels & Demons" is reminiscent of the physicist and philosopher
David Bohm, in that Bohm connected theoretical physics to what a poet
might call "god." Bohm also comes to mind because of Engels'
Dialectics of Nature; those familiar with both the Bohm
interpretation of quantum mechanics, Bohm's work on the "implicate
and explicate order," and the controversies surrounding Dialectics
of Nature, may be able to guess why. Less known than Bohm's
physics and philosophical work is Bohm's contribution to brain
science. The specifics of Bohm's theories are not as relevant here as
the fact that Bohm traversed the gamut from cosmology to a science of
the individual -- a kind of psychology -- and in fact cosmology and
neuropsychology were related to Bohm. Bohm ended up proposing a
constructed language (the "rheomode" mode of language), and what is
effectively a kind of therapy (if not a more "democratic" or
effective workplace culture as some have appropriated Dialogue to
be), referred to as "Dialogue." Bohm was a victim of McCarthyism, but
it is hard for this writer to see in Bohm's work why Bohm deserved
that status, though his ideas recall those who were seeking
U.S.-Soviet détente.
It does not matter if Bohm was ever Catholic, or Jewish (and perhaps
influenced by Avicebron, for example). Bohm's ideas are more likely
to be taken up in the West today because of their similarity to
Catholicism regardless of Bohm's biography and are confluent with a
Catholic discourse, while not claiming to be Catholic. Bohm is an
example of someone who started off in a probing scientific
materialism, but who ended up proposing therapy as a solution to
problems in human society, lamenting the psychic factors supposedly
generating divisions and obstructing resolution of conflicts as if
the advances of Third World people in struggle were not advances. Not
every struggle in the world is like the right arm attacking the left
arm of the same body; the First World is a giant malignant parasite
on the Third World that will be detached. One needs to understand how
Bohm could have gone from making contributions to theoretical physics
and neuroscience to critiquing society while marginalizing historical
materialism and revolution. This cannot be accomplished by noting
that Bohm dealt with abstractions of different objects and saying
that Bohm should have addressed more individuals concretely. On the
contrary, perhaps Bohm knew that he could not talk with all of the
billions of people with whom he shared the world, so he sought to
grapple with what was in common between individuals. (The mass line
in Maoism and the mass meeting are not some rehashed Catholicism.
Even Bohm had an understanding of the diminishing returns of
gathering opinions from individuals, and of communicating with
individuals immediately, face-to-face and on an affective level,
though Bohm's ideas about abstraction, individuality and culture took
him in a peculiar direction that Maoists would not go in, one that
led him back to individuals.) In such a context, a focus on
phenomenology, neuroscience etc. would make sense (leaving aside the
time line of developments in Bohm's work). Instead of dealing with
millions of different individuals, one can deal with difference,
experience, perception, perspective, and subjectivity, in general. A
focus on individuals leads to individualism and ahistorical,
metaphysical individualist abstractions such as Homo
economicus. The error of those such as David Bohm cannot be
avoided by taking individuals even in their concrete plurality as
one's starting point.(3)
In terms of Dialogue, Bohm said that a group with a sufficient number
of people (Bohm spoke of numbers less than a hundred) could
constitute a "microculture" representative of the whole of culture at
large. It would be a kind of sample, of individuals. The operative
word is "individual." Though he himself engaged with philosopher U.
G. Krishnamurti, Bohm wrote as if a group of only Westerners could
accomplish a dissolution of the psychic structures throttling
unrestrained communication. Bohm envisioned an expanding unity of
individuals; Bohm presupposed an underlying unity of individuals,
when it had not been demonstrated except by abstraction. At the same
time, in practice (and in theory) the number of dialogue participants
at a particular moment and in a particular place would be limited.
David Bohm remained committed to materialism throughout his work and
incorporated physics insights in other fields he studied in a
self-consistent way. Yet, and in spite of his ideas' resonating with
New Age, Bohm is more demonstrably Catholic than most open Catholics
on several points: in his pursuit of a transcendent truth
simultaneous with exploring the (in)dividual, in his treatment of
philosophy and of the relationship between philosophy and science, in
his view of the unity of the natural world and humanity,(4) in his view of the relationship
between part and whole -- in a way -- and last but not least in his
emphasis on a dialogic process (as opposed to a dialectic process).
(Bohm's view of the relationship between subject and object is more
divergent, though creation and free will are arguably extraneous to
Bohm's view.) In this way, Bohm is indicative of the future of
Catholics, and of crypto-Catholics.
Intellectually, David Bohm ended up more cosmopolitan and less
individualist than most Catholics, and pseudo-Marxists in the West.
Catholicism has an ontology of cultures, and the Catholic Church has
expressed disagreement with cosmopolitanism. But, Bohm did not break
out of liberalism and was individualist in practice, and the
methodological and epistemological underpinnings of that are similar
to the methodology and epistemology of contemplative materialists
calling themselves "Catholic" and other contemplative materialists
calling themselves "Marxist" ("similar" because what pseudo-Marxists
have is actually worse). Bohm discussed specific things in society,
but did not study the internal relations of things and their
surroundings, and the historical development of these relations.
Intellectually, Bohm focused on making abstractions and
generalizations about things separately from their concrete relations
or historical development, and this became a ground for a certain
class practice.
Non-Marxist David Bohm fans in the West might ask themselves whether
they think any change is possible as long as white people don't
confront the implicate consciousness and how long they expect for
that to finally happen, but others would do well to study Bohm's work
and ask themselves where pseudo-Marxists who are obsessed with
philosophy questions, and to this day can't give straight answers on
the U.$. labor aristocracy, really depart from Bohm, other than in
being less energetic than Bohm intellectually and more nationalist
and egocentric. Pseudo-Marxists who are opposed to
one-divides-into-two and democratic centralism would find themselves
at home in a Bohm Dialogue group or a Catholic congregation;
although, they might find the Dialogue group, while lacking ongoing
leadership, more attuned to their lifestyle and therapeutic needs. A
Catholic congregation has the Pope and a priest, but the Catholic
Church's orientation to cultures of different peoples is dialogic, as
is the interaction between Catholic lay people. (The point is not
that people in a church in the Third World should be outside killing
each other. Rather, there are different conceptions of interaction,
unity, and advancement. The relationship between the Holy See and
Catholic lay people and lay people at large appears authoritarian and
there is division both within and at the periphery of the church, but
the Catholic Church holds little state power in the West today and
its scope of advancement is limited, so the issue of the relation to
Catholic clergy would require some elaboration.) Whereas Marxism
leads to recognizing the unity of the proletariat as a class,
Catholicism emphasizes the unity of people as individuals in their
innate pursuit of Christ's revelation. A pseudo-Marxist group
attaching to the word "communism" could be held together by a cult of
personality. Pseudo-Marxists are prone to concentrating on one
individual, the individual who is the main thing uniting a group, or
studying one white individual (who could be themselves) or scattered
white individuals as a substitute for studying classes and social
forces. Likewise, Catholics study Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, and
saints, and learn about pockets of destitute white people by reading
the New York Times and watching CNN, and most in the West ally
with the imperialists. In place of studying Jesus etc.,
pseudo-Marxists focus on the biographies of revolutionaries and
alleged revolutionaries. Other than that, much is the same. Although,
Western pseudo-Marxists do less charity than open Catholics and
experience less pressure from people in the Third World than the Holy
See does. The so-called internationalism and even the so-called
anti-imperialism of U.$. pseudo-Marxists is a hitching of the Third
World to the Democratic Party, and the larger left wing of
parasitism, to which the pseudo-Marxists are utterly beholden.
Open Catholics have a kind of praxis, and they change reality while
cognizing it, as everyone does who belongs to human society. Also,
open Catholics have a conception of change and development. Catholic
epistemological thinking on cognition contains notions of experience,
including communal experience, and practice.(5) What is lacking is the outlook of a class
changing reality. The fallacy of contemplative materialism cannot be
grasped as long as one thinks the central question is like, "How do I
overthrow (or "help" overthrow) capitalism?" An individual's or a
party's implementing a dialectical method is not the same thing as
setting and trying to reach a utopian goal such as the overthrow of
capitalism by leading one's white neighborhood. People who treat
dialectical materialism as such are prone to pulling stunts not
totally unlike the conspiratorial camerlengo character in "Angels &
Demons" does to lead people on a false basis. The Maoist
exploiter-division strategy for the First World is not riling up
exploiters and trying to lead them to a utopia by stunts and tricks.
Division tactics are connected to a perhaps-undeveloped, but
already-existing international class struggle, not seeking to harness
a counterrevolutionary domestic class while stoking reaction,
economic fictions, illogic, and pseudoscience. In "On Practice," Mao
Zedong writes, "Leaving aside their genius, the reason why Marx,
Engels, Lenin and Stalin could work out their theories was mainly
that they personally took part in the practice of the class struggle
and the scientific experimentation of their time . . . ." By "the
practice of the class struggle . . . of their time," Mao refers to
the practice of a whole class, the proletariat or the proletariat in
a nation, and discusses a process of cognition belonging to the whole
proletariat. Individuals exist in relation to classes. Contrary to
bourgeois ridiculing of Chinese workers' applying dialectics at their
workplace, one-dividing-into-two worked for the Chinese workers,
because those workers were part of the proletarian class engaged in
struggle. Materialist dialectics is a weapon in the hands of the
proletariat, a weapon that only the proletariat can use. That is not
a hyperbolic statement, but a statement on what the bourgeoisie as a
class and individuals by themselves are capable and incapable of
doing. The proletariat has materialist dialectics; the bourgeoisie
has its own weapons that the proletariat cannot use successfully
overall -- individualism and Liberalism -- but which cannot save the
bourgeoisie from certain destruction.
Ludwig Feuerbach made a distinction between Catholicism in theory and
whether Catholicism is much different from Protestantism in practice.
Regarding this distinction between Catholic theory and Catholic
practice, Catholic practice in science is contemplative-materialist
-- an odd occurrence where the ideas of bourgeois materialists such
as Feuerbach have influenced the development of Catholic practice in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and even potentially Catholic
theory, so that now Catholic natural scientists at Catholic
universities may be hard to distinguish from natural scientists at
secular universities. Yet, the Catholic Church aren't the original
contemplative materialists. Feuerbach built contemplative materialism
upon a critique of Christianity, and Catholicism in particular. It is
true "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point is to change it." But a danger of limiting oneself to
reciting Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach," ad nauseum, is that one may
forget what Feuerbach was responding to. The most hackneyed quote
from "Theses" has become twisted into a justification for neglecting
awareness of Catholicism and contemplative materialism as if the
Marxist dialectical method came naturally in the First World -- or
all humans already fully carried out dialectical materialism
unconsciously in cognition and dialectical materialism were not
itself in a process of historical unfolding in human society. (Of
course, another attitude is that dialectical materialism is simply
unimportant, a relic of bygone factional struggle or scholastic
pedantry.) According to Feuerbach, Catholicism involves a search for
perfection, God, who, while identified with the individual, is seen
as residing at a distance in a fog of mystery. God is more external
to the individual than in Protestantism. Protestantism is more
consonant with the way people already are (and have to be), argues
Feuerbach, whereas Catholicism is a prolonged moral striving to be
like God that extends to wanting to suffer as Jesus did. Catholicism
and Protestantism are both Christian, but contemplation of nature and
contemplation of self receive more emphasis in Catholicism than in
Protestantism, which has a greater emphasis on Christology. Wherever
one looks, God always ends up being somewhere else, to such an extent
that God becomes defined in opposition to everything that exists in
human society, except suffering, which has an objective existence,
and love, a feeling. The suffering of every individual is a
reflection of the truth; simultaneously, God alone is the totality of
human torment, endured in love, but is neither the totality of human
activity nor merely human. Catholicism, as described by Feuerbach,
contains expressions of both contemplative materialism and
pre-materialist idealism.
Feuerbach critiqued Catholicism, but also absorbed it. One of
Feuerbach's main points is that Christianity expresses a truth
regarding contemplation of the world and contemplation of self, but
stifles and distorts that truth. (Love and communication with others,
the need for which Christianity also expresses, are necessary to
mediate the proper relationship between self and the world. "A man
existing absolutely alone would lose himself without any sense of his
individuality in the ocean of Nature; he would neither comprehend
himself as man nor Nature as Nature." (p. 82) "Four hands can do more
than two, but also four eyes can see more than two. And this combined
power is distinguished not only in quantity but also in quality from
that which is solitary. In isolation human power is limited, in
combination it is infinite. The knowledge of a single man is limited,
but reason, science, is unlimited, for it is a common act of mankind
. . . ." (p. 83)) Removing it from God, Feuerbach restores infinitude
to what he considers its proper place: the human species. Feuerbach
wants religion, unadulterated by theology. Feuerbach wants to reunite
self and the world, connect contemplation of the world to self and
vice versa, draw focus to the human species and human nature as
direct objects of contemplation (without God as an intermediary and
block) and in connection to the individual, reunite the mind and the
heart, and reunite self with other individuals, in affective and
intellectual communion, while retaining individuality, the basis of
infinite contemplation. "Nature gives the material, mind gives the
form." (p. 277) " . . . that is infinite which has nothing like
itself, which consequently does not stand as an individual under a
species, but is species and individual in one, essence and existence
in one." (p. 42) " . . . an infinite plenitude or multitude of
predicates which are really different, so different that the one does
not immediately involve the other, is realized only in an infinite
plenitude or multitude of different beings or individuals. Thus, the
being of man is infinitely rich in different kinds of predicates, but
precisely for that reason it is infinitely rich in different kinds of
individuals." (p. 23) Though ostensibly more friendly to
Protestantism (with statements such as, "He who has once offered up
the Mother of God to the understanding, is not far from sacrificing
the mystery of the Son of God as an anthropomorphism" (pp. 72-73)),
Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity's relation to
Catholicism is clearly more complex than, and far short of, a total
negation. Feuerbach treated Protestantism as a step in the liberation
from theology, or perfection, of what he found in Catholicism, but
which he associated with all religion ahistorically. The opinion that
First World "atheists" less transparent than Feuerbach have of
themselves, and of the importance of their ideas differentiating from
theism, should not be taken for granted. Underneath much so-called
atheism in the First World is Catholicism, and underneath Catholicism
and other religion, and supposed non-religion, in the First World is
international exploitation.
When an unreal goal is set, an inevitable successor to contemplative
materialism is a particularly decrepit idealism. Setting a goal such
as Euro-Amerikan worker revolution, rather than attaining a divinely
perfect morality, is no guarantee against idealism. For that matter,
Catholicism has a concept of doing "good works" that Feuerbach
discusses in distinction from Protestantism, in which primacy is
placed on faith, not works. While the Catholic Church gropes for
perfection, "works" in the meantime establish faith. Catholic charity
is not much different in this context from pseudo-Marxists'
organizing efforts and "service" in the West demonstrating faith in
the white worker. (Apart from this, there is an ethical component of
Catholic knowledge production that is not the focus of the present
article, but which involves idealism and has certain parallels with
pseudo-Marxism.) Pseudo-Marxists sense the futility of what they are
doing, but commit to it almost religiously. Improvement for these
people would be to declare openly that their goal is not revolution,
but more super-profit for white workers.
Lenin distinguished between a metaphysical materialist view of
idealism and a dialectical materialist view of idealism. In doing so,
Lenin showed how contemplative materialism itself is idealist. In "On
the Question of Dialectics" (1915), Lenin writes:
"From the standpoint of dialectical materialism . . .
philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated,
überschwengliches (Dietzgen) development (inflation,
distention) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge
into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature,
apotheosized. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. True. But
philosophical idealism is . . . a road to clerical obscurantism
through one of the shades of the infinitely complex knowledge
(dialectical) of man."
What pseudo-Marxists inflate, distend and apotheosize is the white
working class and its productivity as if Euro-Amerika bounded a whole
capitalist economy unto itself. The white working class is held to be
incapable of changing into a counterrevolutionary class, though the
white working class is a minority of the working class globally. It
is true that the Marxist abstractions of the classes and relations of
production belonging to the capitalist mode of production are
materialist, and it is true that white workers have a material
existence, but the pseudo-Marxists' approach to them is idealist.
Now, by "infinitely complex knowledge," Lenin refers to Joseph
Dietzgen's idea of the scientific inexhaustibility of the material
world. In the context of contemplative materialism, this requires
some elaboration. The point that Lenin is making about the
development of knowledge has to do with the dialectical structure and
movement of matter as it really is. If one assumes that the white
working class has false consciousness resulting in its lack of
revolutionary activity and one focuses on the causes of this false
consciousness, the questions that appear may very well be
inexhaustible, but it is like what Lenin describes: taking one
fragment of the curve that is human knowledge and distorting it
one-sidedly. Claiming to reject one-sidedness, some pseudo-Marxists
while speaking of many-sidedness and provisionality have twisted
"dialectics" into a justification for denying the primacy of
exploitation as a structural cause of proletarian revolution. They
endlessly prate about false consciousness, subjective factors, "the
media," the alleged errors of Marxist so-called orthodoxy, etc.,
without relating their thought to practice systematically. Though
fervently claiming a white proletariat, they often -- intentionally
or unwittingly as zombies -- orient themselves toward the (First
World) middle class, which after all is just as obstinate as the
First World supposed proletariat, or toward some institution of the
federal government involved in foreign diplomacy/intelligence,
because they do not grasp the true vehicles for revolution.
An example of racism supposedly supporting Third World people, a
phony Marxist organization superficially different from other phony
Marxist organizations in claiming to agree with MIWS on the general
First World class structure pissed on the idea of Black nation
party-building only to turn around and talk about certain white
ethnic/cultural minorities among U.$. whites as if they had special
contributions to make to Third World revolution as communists, via
identity politics and other non-Leninism.(6) (The point of critiquing class and gender
privilege in the United $tates existing as a general condition was
never to justify a strategy focusing on white middle-class straight
males while using the same tactics as a Trotskyist organization and
the FBI, but with anti-First World rhetoric; homophobia, racism, and
sexism; or opposing single-nation vanguards.) If even Black U.$.
citizen (outside-prison) workers are petty-bourgeois at least, which
they are, it should go without saying that Rosa Luxemburg's ideas and
size-ism are inappropriate with middle-class whites, too. If there is
this kind of problem among those supposedly sharing MIWS's line on
the First World class structure, of course the problem is going to be
widespread in the Western so-called communist movement as a whole.
When parasitism questions are raised, one is liable to come across
people who object, "What about this minority of whites?" Or, "What
about my mother, who has a chronic illness and crappy insurance?" Or
even, "What about me, as a Scottish-descended worker without a job?"
Well, what about it? Ideas can be put to the test. Instead of testing
their ideas, pseudo-Marxists are apt to just talk about various
identities, or their own identities as if their own personal
suffering, development or activism had anything scientifically to do
with what is possible with a whole group of people -- suggestive of
solipsism or a dualism where white workers will one day become
revolutionary by dint of their will and inherent goodness. An
abstract idea of common suffering (both a complement to and a
(redemptive) inversion of universal sinfulness), which both
upper-middle-class First World people and super-exploited
proletarians can share, is great for personality cults, and worship
of deities as Feuerbach discusses, not so for ending oppression in
the concrete.
"The triune God has a substantial meaning only when there is an
abstraction from the substance of real life. The more empty life
is, the fuller, the more concrete is God. The impoverishing of
the real world and the enriching of God is one act. God springs
out of the feelings of a want; what man is in need of, whether
this be a definite and therefore conscious, or an unconscious
need -- that is God. Thus the disconsolate feeling of a void, of
loneliness, needed a God in whom there is society, a union of
beings fervently loving each other." (p. 73)
The proletariat does not need First Worlders' pouring out sympathy
for Third World people while thinking they are suffering themselves.
There is no shortage of people talking about the Third World as a
place of tumult and an object of excitement, and there does not need
to be an additional Amerikan sense of victimhood in the mix. If an
Amerikan does not understand how to be a communist surrounded by
exploiters without making "communist" into a synonym of a Democrat
and thinks there is a group of exploited Euro-Amerikans in Appalachia
or Dixie who can be led to power and not as fascists, he or she
should move there. If one thinks the white proletariat is in
deindustrialized towns, ditto, and the same with workers at
truck-stop diners and teenage fast-food workers in suburbia. If Minor
League Baseball players and Certified Public Accountants are really
exploited, don't just talk about it. U.$. pseudo-Maoists come up with
supposed exceptions to the idea that a majority of Euro-Amerikan
workers are exploiters, but typically do not go with or stick to the
ideas they raise and end up following the Democratic Party, which
means staying in the big multicultural coastal cities. On the other
hand, if one thinks there have to be Blacks and Latinos around for
whites to be revolutionary, he or she should articulate that view
openly. Most pseudo-Maoists are actually papering over or otherwise
obscuring national oppression of Blacks and Latinos, often because
they are attached to integrationist super-profit redistribution
efforts of the left wing of parasitism. Such people following the
leadership of the Democratic Party to such an extent that they will
move away from where the supposed white proletariat is to go to New
York or San Francisco, under the impression that the Democratic Party
in New York or San Francisco will bring "red state" white
proletarians to the revolution, are reminiscent of people praying to
Jesus to take care of problems, and Marian intercession, though open
Catholics are less geographic-opportunist than pseudo-Maoists. The
worst sort of contemplative materialist will talk about scattered
individuals and their identities and not do anything pertaining to
them. In this context, some credit has to go to people in large
Catholic charities who can look at a map and point out which areas
need to be served and go do it, separately from the transitory
election-demographic concerns of the Democratic Party. The real
thrust of the pseudo-Maoist critique of economism and workerism is
following the Democratic Party or middle-class people, not anything
really having to do with an actual group of proletarian workers to
whom the terms "economism" and "workerism" as historically understood
might apply.
Though the crypto-Catholicism of Western pseudo-Marxists may be seen
as worse than contemplative materialism, Thomas Aquinas was a
Scholastic and a kind of dialectician. Aquinas is an obvious place to
look if one wants to study the influence of a classical tradition of
contemplative materialism (or a dualist/hylomorphic precursor
thereof) on Catholicism. Aquinas was not a dialectical-materialist
(his dialectic was confined to thought), but neither are the
pseudo-Marxists, and so it is possible that the contemplative
materialism of pseudo-Marxists may compare unfavorably with the
contemplative materialism of Catholics. The fictional Father Silvano
character of "Angels & Demons" in a couple of ways evokes mention of
the real-world physicist Walter Thirring, a member of the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences. Thirring, who himself has made contributions to
quantum field theory and mathematical physics, is the author of a
document that claims to find confirmation of Christianity in quantum
physics and its equations.(7) Instead
of ridiculing Thirring, readers should recognize a relatively
superior method. Thirring reasons from material instances to a
material universal, and then to an ideal. (Thirring claims some
hypotheses and equations were inspired by God. "The deduction of
these laws was not logically compelling but used above all arguments
of beauty and simplicity." Secular science has the concepts of
"latent variables" and "hypothetical constructs" the question of
whose origin is in some cases open-ended or left to historians of
science and others.) In contrast, Western pseudo-Maoists are awash in
individualism of the narrowest kind, and subjectivism masquerading as
dialectical materialism with a pseudo-dialectical rhetoric of
fluidity, complexity, and indefiniteness, that is often just
posturing or trying to have things both ways. The only universal for
these people is their own ego or the cult of personality of one guru
or another.
The practice of spewing trite quotations and phrases regarding
Marxist philosophy in disjointed fashion must be shunned. "The point
is to change [the world]" does not mean fantasizing about a
proletariat of the Aryan master race decade after decade and banging
one's head against the wall with white workers. On the other hand, a
related idea of not putting things to the test because reality will
change anyway sounds very realist and dialectical, but has nothing to
do with dialectical materialism. There is an underlying perverse
attitude toward advancement and theory, if not an attitude that
imperialism and other oppression like gender oppression are here to
stay, leaving morality as the only recourse. And, when Mao wrote "All
genuine knowledge originates in direct experience," and, "But one
cannot have direct experience of everything; as a matter of fact,
most of our knowledge comes from indirect experience . . . ," that
was in a context that included the collective practice of a group of
people -- a practice neither led by geniuses nor unscientific -- not
some Catholic idea about the self's containing truth coupled with
interacting with as many individuals as pragmatically possible to
glean the truth.
The relative merits of open Catholicism compared with
crypto-Catholicism
References to a global wealth "gap" of social origin and "iniquitous
commercial relations among nations" are right in the Catechism of
the Catholic Church. Without getting into the content specific to
the encyclical here, it is interesting the extent to which Benedict
XVI's Caritas in veritate (Charity in Truth) took many
by surprise, not just as an intervention in the midst of economic
upheaval, but as if the Catholic Church had rarely or never dealt
with the "social question" in a global context to any significant
degree. Not everything in Catholic science is like proving the
existence of God. It is not unheard of to come across a Catholic
clergy person who is able to point out that most people in the First
World (or average "middle-class" people in a First World country)
consume more than the average person in the world -- which might go
unrecognized if one has a need to inflate the size of imperialists'
profit or assumes that the cost of living in the Third World is much
lower. Sounds obvious, but actually one needs to know what a median
is, what a mean is, and a definition of consumption. Notice it is not
"average person in the First World" -- which could be a reflection of
millionaires skewing the income distribution -- but "most people in
the First World." This is not immediately obvious, and several steps
are required to reach the conclusion. On the other hand, the math
involved is supposed to be learned by Amerikans before graduating
from elementary school -- something that may not be understood by
fake communists flattering as potential vanguard leaders high school
drop-outs who can't be bothered with analytical use of numbers
themselves.
The reason it, in the First World, has to be anti-Marxist Catholic
clergy pointing out that consumption fact is not that such facts are
exclusively interesting to people glamorizing those suffering more
than they. It is that First World so-called Marxists are opportunist
and don't give straight answers on economic differences between the
First World population and the Third World population.
Pseudo-Marxists talk about various facts of hardship in the Third
World, but rarely relate those to conditions of different First World
classes and do so only as a patina, lest the masses notice they have
rejected Leninism on the labor aristocracy and other points.
Catholics sometimes illustrate the global consumption distribution
visually using beans or grain. This may be connected to an idea about
being "less fortunate" or "compassion" for the "most vulnerable." Of
course, missing from the picture is production and exploitation or
transfers. Most adults in the First World don't produce anything
remotely comparable to beans or grain, which complicates the idea of
sharing. Then, there are issues of trade. Catholic universities have
had people lecture who are familiar with unequal exchange in Marxist
terms, but this reviewer does not expect Catholics claiming to be
neither Marxist nor communist to deal with things much deeper than
GDP (which many wrongly take for granted as an indicator of
productivity). The situation with university-educated people claiming
to be the proletarian vanguard is different, but most such people in
the West don't acknowledge certain important facts, let alone explain
them. It is not always an epistemological issue involved in the way
this writer has suggested, but in some cases deliberate falsification
of facts and Marxist theory. Although, in actuality (and
notwithstanding the eighth commandment) being Catholic does not
require believing everything coming out of one's mouth.
With open Catholics, this writer can trust that uneven global income
distribution will be a continuous source of concern even if their
strategy for fixing it is wrong, less so with pseudo-Marxists who
come up with the most scientific- or dialectical-sounding chauvinist
justifications for exploitation when the issue of unequal exchange is
pushed. First World organizations claiming to be Marxist and leading
a class or classes in their nations have a greater disposition to
misrepresent class structure. Also, they are less affected by
impoverishment in the Third World. Significantly, Liberation Theology
is beside the point. The Catholic infiltration of "Marxism" in the
First World is more dangerous than any "Marxist" infiltration of
Catholicism in the Third World, but more revealing here than the work
of dissident priests are papal encyclicals. Despite its being an
inspiration of liberation theology criticized by the Holy See, the
March 1967 encyclical of Paul VI, "Populorum progressio," continues
to be upheld. Without once flattering the "people" of the United
$tates in particular or raising oppression of Amerikan workers (only
"concerted action," "hungry nations of the world cry out to the
peoples blessed with abundance," "mutual cooperation among nations,"
etc.), "Populorum progressio" states, "Unless the existing machinery
is modified, the disparity between rich and poor nations will
increase rather than diminish . . . ." "Populorum progressio" draws
particular attention to trade and "distortion": " . . . the basic
crops and raw materials produced by the less developed countries are
subject to sudden and wide-ranging shifts in market price; they do
not share in the growing market value of industrial products." "Thus
the needy nations grow more destitute, while the rich nations become
even richer." "[The principle of free trade] can work when both
parties are about equal economically . . . . But the case is quite
different when the nations involved are far from equal. Market prices
that are freely agreed upon can turn out to be most unfair." By
contrast, many pseudo-Marxists, despite criticizing First World
policies in relation to the Third World and having more radical
rhetoric about Catholic colonialism and private property, are still
stuck in a Charles Dickens fantasy of a white proletariat and the
notion that imperialism will level out international differences,
either upward or downward, and are to the right of the bourgeois
internationalism of "Populorum progressio." Even the Weather
Underground Organization, years after "Populorum progressio," was
telling lies claiming the impoverishment of Euro-Amerikan workers. If
the WUO was the best Euro-Amerika produced, then it is difficult to
talk about a simple correspondence between First World atheist
communism and truth. Instead of blaming the Catholic Church for
sapping the proletariat's resistance by assimilating a rhetoric of
misery and injustice, so-called Marxists should blame themselves and
all their bullshit catering to the labor aristocracy. It would be a
herculean task just to get many pseudo-Marxists, some of whom are
stuck in metaphysical denial about the possibility of exploitation in
international trade, to recognize what the Vatican was admitting
forty years ago; that is how reactionary First World "Marxism" is.
In spite of this writer's disagreements with "Sollicitudo rei
socialis," John Paul II's 1987 encyclical "developing" on "Populorum
progressio" reads: "The abundance of goods and services available in
some parts of the world, particularly in the developed North, is
matched in the South by an unacceptable delay, and it is precisely in
this geopolitical area that the major part of the human race lives."
" . . . the developing countries are much more numerous than the
developed ones; the multitudes of human beings who lack the goods and
services offered by development are much more numerous than those who
possess them." This establishes a bar, a minimum of what a Marxist
anywhere in the world should be saying. It is just one bar, one
checkpoint. Marxists need to be more detailed and concrete. Those not
saying even what John Paul II said in 1987 are surely not Marxist,
whether they live in the First World or in a semi-feudal country. At
the same time, those saying what John Paul II said, but not going
much further, can have only a questionable claim to Marxism.
"Populorum progressio" extends concepts in "Rerum novarum" to the
international context. The 1991 encyclical "Centesimus annus" of
opponent of Liberation Theology John Paul II reiterates, "In a
certain sense, these imbalances [between geographic areas] have
shifted the center of the social question from the national to the
international level." The idea that the leveling out of the global
wealth distribution would benefit even the spiritual development of
First Worlders has an unreality to it, but can be expected from the
Catholic Church, notwithstanding ties with Italy (which has wages
among the lowest of First World countries') and less obvious ties
with imperialist countries. In "Sollicitudo rei socialis," the
Catholic Church engaged in critical self-reflection: " . . . the
social teaching of the Church had not yet reached the point of
affirming with such clarity that the social question has acquired a
worldwide dimension, nor had this affirmation and the accompanying
analysis yet been made into a "directive for action," as Paul VI did
in his Encyclical." Encumbered by loyalties to their nations' working
classes, First World alleged Marxists have had more difficulty
transitioning from the national to the international, where
impoverishment may take place on a world scale. Yes, "Populorum
progressio" etc. are bourgeois, but the real motivation of
pseudo-communists for opposing the left-wing bourgeois
internationalism articulated in some Catholic Church writings is
kissing labor aristocracy ass. Paul VI and John Paul II were shades
of bourgeois internationalism. Nobody ever said that bourgeois
internationalism was communism. Bourgeois internationalism can be
reactionary. It is generally status-quo-oriented and more or less
selectively opposed to violent disturbances. George W. Bush, Barack
Obama and the "Revolutionary Communist Party,USA" are shades of a
particularly reactionary bourgeois internationalism. Right-wing
bourgeois internationalism may manifest, for example, as wanting to
use the U.$. military to eliminate zakat and Islamic banking
practices as alleged obstacles to capitalism in Muslim countries. If
the RCP does not belong in the bourgeois-internationalist category,
it would not be because the RCP is more proletarian.
To even George W. Bush's nominal right is the Ku Klux Klan. However,
the KKK and pseudo-communists share a conception of the white working
class as oppressed by what they consider rootless out-of-control
bankers, and they also have in common a virulent anti-Catholicism in
an extremely decadent imperialist country. Anti-papism and opposing
church hierarchy is great for the Third World, in feudal countries
historically and countries with feudal remnants, and countries
historically where fascist corporatism including the Catholic Church
was a real threat, and there is a reason why some Protestants in the
Third World support liberation theology. Those opposing the Pope in
the First World just to pave the way for fascism and a competing
personality cult do not compare favorably with Catholics. It has to
do with more than just the Catholicism of migrants. It is true that
the KKK now allows in white Roman Catholics so that Catholics are
both outside and inside the KKK, but nothing in the present article
should be taken as meaning that the Kennedys or their followers/spawn
are part of the left wing of bourgeois internationalism. Combinations
of white nationalism and the left wing of parasitism are not to be
confused with the left wing of bourgeois internationalism.
Quoting former World Bank economist Robert Wade, the late Notre Dame
professor Denis Goulet related in a document appearing on vatican.va,
"By 1993 an American on the average income of the poorest 10% of the
[U.$.] population was better off than two-thirds of the world's
people" -- something that would be hard to find anywhere in any U.$.
"socialist" party's literature.(8) It
is one thing to admit facts like this before criticizing the Catholic
Church and adding a Marxist analysis. It is another thing to
criticize Benedict XVI on abortions, condoms and homosexuality while
actively denying the vast majority of international exploitation,
which impacts the education, family and health situations in the
Third World, in addition to the economic situation. That is
back-asswards and leads to more strife than what the Catholic Church
is doing. There is no point in talking about "Nazi" popes if one is
covering up the parasitism and reactionary attacks of the labor
aristocracy and covering for corporatism and personality cults in
imperialist countries and fascist anti-migrant crap. As to
homosexuality or gender, Barack Obama is directly responsible for
mass murder and killing more gays, lesbians, bisexuals and
transgender people in the Third World than all the Catholic clergy,
teaching gender roles and opposition to homosexuality, combined at
this time,(9) and Obama is responsible
also for sexual orientation provocations in Muslim countries. Obama's
closest supporters include open and secret gay-bashers who are more
hostile to gays than the Catholic Church. It is often the case that
Catholics say one thing and do another, but the problem is worse in
Democratic Party politics -- an issue of political opportunism, not
lifestyle hypocrisy.
The mass line does not offer a way out of needing to know facts about
global distribution and world conditions and analyzing these facts to
determine the class structure. In imperialist countries, there is a
labor aristocracy. When Mao said, "All work done for the masses must
start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual,
however well-intentioned," that did not mean starting from the needs
of the labor aristocracy; although, starting from the desire of an
individual to lead the labor aristocracy would lead to the same
result, if not worse -- fascism. The mass line applies to the real
masses, which can only be known by investigation and application of
Marxist concepts, seeing whether the assumed masses are themselves
stepping forward in the long term to oppose feudalism or contribute
to the internationalist struggle against capitalism to any degree,
not just seeking more super-profit, and knowing the history of
previous organizing attempts. In its own, Catholic way, the Catholic
Church thinking twice about building too many Catholic schools and
churches for the rich has a better grip on reality than
pseudo-Marxists with their endless opportunism. There is a sense that
trying to build something among First Worlders without regard to
what's going on in other countries could be problematic because of an
unevenness in the world.
Some may object to MIWS's discussion of crypto-Catholicism saying
that crypto-Catholicism lacks papal infallibility, which would seem
particularly relevant to Catholic epistemology. This writer fails to
see how this contrast favors pseudo-Marxists. Without getting into
the details of papal and non-papal Catholic infallibility, adding an
impression of infallibility to the existing cult of personality of a
pseudo-Marxist guru could be an advance. Maintaining contradictory
positions and going back on old positions opportunistically would be
more difficult with an assumption of infallibility. Whether promoted
by him or not, John Paul II had a cult of personality, but connected
to that cult of personality was an infallibility both dovetailing
with the cult and constraining it. Following a revolutionary leader
like a commander on the battlefield who may make mistakes within
tolerance margins is not applicable to the First World, so a cult of
personality in the United $tates, claiming to be political, without
infallibility is a recipe for opportunism befitting a Democratic
Party campaign strategy: Follow in John F. Kennedy's footsteps and
refer to Appalachian inhabitants as the center of the international
proletariat one day, flatter the liberal lifestyle habits of big-city
people the next; say one thing in one area, say another thing in
another area. Elevate heterosexual monogamy and cover for the
COINTELPRO and its sexual provocations against Black revolutionaries;
then, uphold the U.$. military as bearers of free love in Muslim
countries. Talk about the labor aristocracy and parasitism vaguely;
then, use middle-class fascist goon squads against real communists.
Throughout, maneuver with a peculiar, passive-aggressive combination
of stilted rhetoric and false humility. Pseudo-Marxists do take
stands, but they are often stands justifying or allowing opportunism.
Science and democratic centralism in a Marxist communist party do not
involve infallibility and the point is not that a communist party
should have unchanging analyses and strategies (though
pseudo-Marxists change analyses and strategies opportunistically),
but a claim of infallibility could be clarifying in a context where
there is a personality cult uniting unscientific exploiters.
Another objection is that some of the things MIWS associates with
Catholicism are not exclusive to Catholicism. There is something of a
chicken-or-the-egg problem here, because Catholicism at many points
has undergone development in interaction with other intellectual and
spiritual movements. Paradoxically, Feuerbach's work itself is
influenced by Protestantism, and Catholicism to an extent. Generally,
in the last centuries, the Catholic Church has adjusted to the
scientific revolution and to capitalism, and to workers' spontaneous
responses to capitalism (most memorably with the 1891 encyclical
"Rerum novarum"). More recently, the Catholic Church has been
adjusting to decolonization, responses to the Holocaust, Third World
struggles, nuclear pacifism, environmentalism, animal rights, and
even New Age culture to an extent. The Catholic Church is more in
competition with postmodernism and post-structuralism and is
generally opposed to pessimistic or anti-humanist trends appearing
during decadent capitalism, including trends less anti-humanist than
Marxism (which is radically anti-humanist) and which lead back to
Liberalism. Despite the similarity of other trends to Catholicism,
and the influence of trends besides Catholicism in pseudo-Marxism,
differentiating from Catholicism becomes important as one starts to
claim a social praxis. Communism is not hanging out talking with
other "communists," witnessing truth to parasites, trying to unite
with everyone regardless of the contradiction, exhibiting charism(a)
as a "revolutionary," writing poetry about oneself, comparing
practices with ideas and ideas with ideas in idealist fashion, going
on wandering cultural, historical and geographic excursions, studying
various philosophical ideas but not absorbing dialectical materialism
into practice, adopting a realist rhetoric without identifying real
contradictions and their concrete weights, exalting the stagnant
culture of the First World, speculating about geopolitics and
new-fangled strategies but not seriously addressing contradictions
between First World populations and the proletariat, flattering
Democrats (and only Democrats) having difficulties, flattering
assorted Amerikan identities, pissing on current Third World leaders,
cozying up to the U.$. federal government, criminally abetting
repression of the real masses, spreading Democratic big city politics
to upper-class people in the Third World that can't be spread in Red
States, doing publicity stunts, doing charity work, eating "fair
trade" food and practicing "eco-friendly" consumption, and choosing
positions such that one can live her or his existing lifestyle in
capitalist and patriarchal society with less "hypocrisy" -- while
waiting for the white proletariat of the Haymarket massacre or some
other pseudo-Marxist version of Jesus to come back.
In "Angels & Demons," the main character and symbol of free thought,
Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), is led on a wild goose chase bouncing
from one thing to another with only illusory or haphazard
advancement. So it is with many supposed scientific materialists who
purport intellectual superiority to open Catholics looking in all
directions and places for perfection, in affective and intellectual
communion with other individuals while searching for their own
humanity. Reality as there waiting to be disclosed, not in process of
systemic historical change with multiple interconnected and
structurally ordered contradictions on various scales, is an implicit
assumption. Social forces of class, gender and nation, and their
contradictions, are messy, but they underly and pattern change in the
world, including the development of "humanity" in individuals. The
elephant in the room is the global class structure and basic facts
about inequality that pseudo-Marxists have trouble admitting and
cover up. The elephant in the room is not embryonic stem cells,
pregnancy suppression pharmacology or menstrual suppression
pharmacology, or even ancient biological evolution relating to the
origin of the human species. Ancient evolution is important
philosophically and for environmentalism, for example, but most
approach the topic in a basically contemplative-materialist way. The
global class structure and the global class struggle is in the here
and now, and yet it is obscured for reasons no less idealist than
those of Christians who find certain scientific conclusions dissonant
with their theological conclusions. For Amerikans to criticize people
in the Third World who are already fighting the United $tates, but
who have creationist ideas about the origin of the human species or
the soul, before they have faced the class structure in their own
country is itself reactionary or a road to reaction. Creation is
unscientific, but it is not the topic that is separating the
bourgeois and proletarian camps. Failing to address the elephant in
the room for various idealist reasons, the majority of what calls
itself social science or Marxism in the West is not Marxist and may
be called "science" only in an archaic sense. Marxism is supposed to
deal with human society and its development as they concretely are.
Given the choice between pseudo-Marxists yapping about embryonic stem
cells while talking about international exploitation vaguely or only
abstractly and offering the Third World rock concerts, and open
Catholics laying a guilt trip on Amerikans while telling some facts
about global inequality straight up, it is clear whom the masses will
choose eventually, so readers need to ask themselves whether those
thinking of themselves as communists are doing better than Catholics.
Certainly, Langdon has a method. It is a method that belongs in
police investigations and journalism not claiming to be scientific.
It corresponds to the tacit spontaneous materialism of daily life in
capitalist society, as well as to the functioning of repressive state
organs. Inappropriately transferred to science, the method becomes a
distortion of science. That said, most Amerikans don't make it out of
"Survivor," MTV, Conan O'Brien and hottie CNN anchor stupor to even
read the world news section of a newspaper.
Regarding morality and ethics and Catholicism versus Marxism, by
opposing contemplative materialism, Marx and Engels both opposed the
distinction between ethics and other branches of philosophy and
peripheralized ethics. Questions of what individuals or anyone should
do separately from the dynamics of class, gender, and nation, are not
interesting to Marxism, and there are various reasons why one might
choose the goal of ending exploitation. To put it another way, if one
is not facing concrete realities about exploitation, questions about
God, sin, and salvation, and coming up with a competing moral
philosophy, are less than secondary. The existence of class struggle
is not basically due to one group's or another's having a certain
ethics. Many communists started out in Christianity or Judaism, and
that is fine if they don't stay there; trying to create a different
morality before the proletariat has state power will not accomplish
much except perhaps reinforcing Liberalism in a secular form.
There are Catholics in the CIA, and there are Catholics in the Third
World repressed by the CIA. Their stated ethics may not differ much.
The relative merits of open Catholicism have to do with ethics only
to the extent that conscious opposition to monotheism in the First
World leads to behavior more reactionary than average. True,
scientific communism upholds armed struggle of the proletariat
against the bourgeoisie, and the Roman Catholic fifth commandment
"You shall not kill" has a problem with that as Marxism holds armed
struggle to be unavoidable and even most so-called Marxists do not
think of the proletariat as being currently a state actor, but there
is no people's war going on inside of First World borders. The only
political killing going on in the First World involves fascism and
government provocations. Although, no doubt there are
pseudo-communists who are accomplices of Barack Obama fantasizing
that they are carrying out proletarian armed struggle via the CIA and
the U.$. military -- killing of people outside the First World. So,
maybe opposition to monotheism in the First World actually just leads
to more murder of Third World people, more death threats, etc.
Nonetheless, this is not a matter of what ethics belongs in Marxism.
Stupid pseudo-Marxists talk about Marxism as if it were an ethics
itself or should have an ethics, instead of emphasizing how the world
works, what is happening, and strategy, and then they wonder why
there are scientists flattering religious people in the First World,
and tolerance of religion in the Third World, where there are fewer
scientists per capita because of international exploitation. This
writer does not want to undermine efforts to decrease hostility
toward Muslims, but it is clear that some First World scientists'
embrace of religion (typically not Islam) originates in contemplative
materialism. As to the Third World, people in the Third World might
as well be Catholics and Muslims if supposedly atheist "Marxists"
aren't talking about the global class structure and a strategy that
doesn't involve following the Democratic Party in one way or another.
From the standpoint of improving the science situation in the Third
World, one could be indifferent to pseudo-Marxism. Real communism
does not compete with Catholicism and Islam on an ethical plane. Real
communism points out strategic differences and shows what science is
-- and involves the masses in it whether they are religious or not
(party membership being another question). Real communism lets
Catholicism and Islam wither away at this time. Right now, Muslims
are orienting the masses toward the best strategy, and if atheist
Marxists in the Third World don't have the same following, it is
their own damn fault for sucking up to Amerika, and they deserve
every rebuke from the masses for their false scientific pretensions,
lackeyism, and racism.
Those preoccupied with ethical philosophy may interest themselves in
Robert Langdon's actions and motivations. Either Langdon was or was
not going to stop the attacks, and the ending could have turned out
one of many ways. Pseudo-dialecticians may speak of complexity and a
contingent transformation of quantity into quality, but there is a
sharp difference between Marxism with its conceptions of structure
and class struggle, on the one hand, and a notion of basically
historically disconnected events and institutions that ought to be
confronted by individuals on the way to realizing a utopia.
I forget exactly what he says, but maybe Langdon claims to do what he
does out of a concern for civil society. Not for no reason is
Rawlsianism popular in the West. "Angels & Demons" is suggestive of
Catholicism leading to Rawlsianism and Rawlsianism leading to
Catholicism. International class struggle is controversial to the
Western majority. Westerners are more able to agree on ideas
centering on individuals, though those ideas result in distorting
science. Many Westerners are fine with the idea of communism as long
as it does not involve an equalizing global redistribution, or
violent overthrow of their class and restriction of their individual
freedoms. Health care for Amerikans without global redistribution is
consistent with some versions of Rawlsianism. Various ideologies
exhort Amerikans to ethical principles, but ultimately exculpate
Amerikans as individuals. Communism requires knowing class structure
and class struggle in the concrete, not idealist premises selected
for Liberal or other non-scientific reasons.
The below draws attention to liberalism defined as unprincipled
tolerance. Replace "liberalism" with capital-L "Liberalism" or
"Christianity," though, and the words will still be correct.
"People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as
abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to
practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to
replace their liberalism with Marxism. These people have their
Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well -- they talk
Marxism, but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others,
but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in
stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain
people work." --"Combat Liberalism"
Notes
1. In The German Ideology, Marx
and Engels write:
"Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural
science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye
of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be
without industry and commerce? Even this pure natural science is
provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade
and industry, through the sensuous activity of men. So much is
this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this
production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as it now
exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach
would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but
would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own
perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing."
However, the problem or potential problem with contemplative
materialism in present-day natural science is not just natural
scientists' not understanding social practice as the foundation of
natural science and its object. In the same paragraph, Marx and
Engels speak to method. "In the first case, the contemplation of the
sensuous world, he necessarily lights on things which contradict his
consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes,
the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially
of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in
a double perception, a profane one which only perceives the
“flatly obvious” and a higher, philosophical, one which
perceives the “true essence” of things." (emphasis added)
2. True, in writing an article about a
film and Catholicism, this writer risks the contemplative materialism
of "analyze yet another facet of the superstructure," reminiscent of
how postmodernists and post-structuralists endlessly talk about
culture, discourse, or language. Most "Marxists" in the English
language talking about the superstructure claim that the First World
working class has false consciousness. This writer does not.
Imperialist parasitism is the invariant factor in many First World
issues, so one might suppose it would be unnecessary to address
Catholicism specifically. This writer sympathizes with that point,
but there is a struggle at the margin involving Catholicism in the
First World anti-militarist movement, and there is a struggle at the
margin, in the world, between left-wing bourgeois internationalism
and Maoism. (In the First World anti-militarist movement, vacillating
Catholic attitudes regarding acculturation of migrants and "security"
weaken anti-militarism.) Catholicism is a force to be reckoned with
and leads would-be Maoists to left-wing bourgeois internationalism,
among other reasons because most of so-called Marxism has not
convincingly addressed international trade and is involved in
suppressing factual knowledge of inequality. There are Catholic
anti-militarists and left-wing bourgeois internationalists in united
fronts, and there ought not be an expectation for most First Worlders
in the united front to become Maoist, but maintaining the
independence of the proletariat in the united front involves being on
guard against Catholicism and other variants of Christianity. On the
perimeter of the united front, the united front is always in danger
of disintegrating into counterrevolution, which can be
Christianity-influenced, under the banner of "Marxism" and
"international working-class solidarity."
3. At his most advanced, Karl Marx did
not take the individual as a presupposition in the sense that the
individual had a given importance in theory, and Marx sought to
understand relations in human society in a concrete, historical and
increasingly deep way. By "deep" is not meant studying what makes
individual white exploiters different from other individual white
exploiters ad nauseum.
4. Compare with: "Through this saving
transformation of the person through Christ and the Holy Spirit,
everything in the universe is also transformed and comes to share in
the glory of God."
International Theological Commission, "Communion and Stewardship:
Human Persons Created in the Image of God," 2004 July 23,
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/r
c_con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html
5. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza,
"Systematic Theology: Tasks and Methods," in Systematic Theology :
Roman Catholic Perspectives, vol. 1 (pp. 1-87), edited by Francis
Schüssler Fiorenza and John P. Galvin (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg
Fortress, 1991).
Concerning "generalized empirical method" and Bernard Lonergan, the
Catholic theologian, philosopher and economist of most obvious
relevance to Catholic epistemology in connection to Catholic
universities, the claim of the present writer is not that the
implicit epistemology of pseudo-Marxists is that of a specific recent
Catholic writer or a specific formal formulation. For a somewhat
similar reason, this writer avoids explicitly discussing Kantianism,
Platonism, etc., which though broad intellectual trends are not
clearly objectively demarcated in the West in practice; for that
matter, both Platonism and Kantianism are discernible in contemporary
Catholicism. Catholicism is an objectively existing organic ideology
that has tremendous influence on non-Jewish Westerners interested in
oppression in society or "social justice."
Lonergan's "dialectic of community" premised on the individual
seeking self-transcendence and on mutuality, and Lonergan's concepts
of spontaneous intersubjectivity and practical intelligence, are
relevant to this writer's discussion of crypto-Catholic
pseudo-Marxism, but are a reflection of Catholic ideology existing
prior to Lonergan's work.
6. As useful as this is as a segue,
this writer does not want to stretch the point about Catholicism. I
can see how Protestantism could be an influence among some
pseudo-Marxists, or the Manson Family. One organization's ideas are
redolent of Helter Skelter, suggestive of setting off a global race
war in the aftermath of which a group of enlightened whites will come
to power and lead the surviving masses of non-whites, viewed as
incapable of more than pre-scientific thought. The group itself is a
cult exhibiting cult phenomena and cult tactics, evidenced in its
line openly rejecting the Marxism-Leninism part of
"Marxism-Leninism-Maoism."
7. Walter E. Thirring, "God's traces
in the laws of nature," in The Cultural Values of Science (pp.
362-372), Pontifical Academy of Sciences 2002 November 8-11 plenary
session proceedings, part V, 2003,
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/archiv
io/s.v.105_cultural_values/part5.pdf
"If you like, you may picture 'the earth was dark and vast' of
Genesis as the vacuum of quantum gravity and 'there be light' as
its breakdown due to its instability. If the whole universe
appears in a small region, its gravitational energy will be near
-∞ so the energy of its matter must be close to +∞.
That is to say, the newly created universe will be very hot and
all possible particles will be created. The reason why now we
can continue the speculation scientifically is that on a small
scale we can reconstruct such a situation using high energy
accelerators." (p. 364)
8. Globalisation and
Inequalities, Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences 2002
April 8-9 colloquium proceedings, part 1, 2002,
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/docume
nts/miscellanea3-1of3.pdf, p. 8.
9. Compare the number of homicides and
suicides of homosexuals/bisexuals/transgenders (in excess of the
general homicide and suicide rates) that might be attributable to the
U.S. Catholic Church with the number of Third World people dead due
to U.S. diplomatic, intelligence and military activity who happen to
be homosexual/bisexual/transgender.
At this time when few have a dialectical materialist theory of
gender, the attitude that death by homophobia/transphobia is "worse"
than death by hunger and disease could be Christian actually and/or
Liberal, focusing on intentions and culture narrowly and not on what
is bringing about change. The Third World's struggle against Amerika
is doing more to advance to a world without oppression of homosexuals
and transgenders than those in power including lifestyle liberals.
Muslims perceive their different-sex marriages as being ruined by the
U.$. military trying to bring "Real World" and other MTV/Hollywood to
their countries, and that is not going to stop until the cultural
arrogance of Amerikans ends.
Bibliography
Friedrich Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy," 1886.
International Theological Commission, "Communion and Stewardship:
Human Persons Created in the Image of God," 2004 July 23,
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/r
c_con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html
John Paul II, "Ex corde Ecclesiae," 1990 August 15,
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_constitutions/doc
uments/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae_en.html
John Paul II, Fides et ratio, 1998 September 14,
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/h
f_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html
Leo XIII, "Aeterni Patris," 1879 August 4,
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-
xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris_en.html
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, translated by
Marian Evans from the 2nd German edition (London: Trübner & Co.,
1881).
"Quantum Study Simplified in Pei-ching University -- Another Victory
for Mao Tse-tung Ideology," U.S. government translation of article in
Beijing Ribao, 1960 May 24,
http://marxistphilosophy.org/MaoQuantum.pdf