There is no salvation

It seems to me that the main reason why so many people get all caught up in promoting some parochial system of belief, whether it be a religion, a secular ideology, or a philosophical point of view, is that they so often fall under the control of their own negative emotions, based primarily on ego-projection. In every culture and in every region, millions of people in today’s world, as well as throughout history, have succumbed to heteronymic interpretations of events that are not at all based on reason, or science, or well-researched analysis of the real world.

Most of these people get themselves trapped into identifying with unfounded passions that lead them far away from reality, into the mystical realms of philosophical idealism, convincing themselves that they have to “sincerely believe” in some kind of artificial construct that will presumably “give meaning to their lives”. They want to find something that they think will provide them with “the answers” designed to alleviate their underlying anxiety about the temporary and uncertain nature of the real world, as it is gradually being uncovered by scientific discovery. They seek “salvation” of some kind, any kind, to put an end to deep-rooted feelings of alienation and “incompleteness”, and provide them with a “sense of belonging” to some concocted, paranormal entity “much greater than themselves”.

They eagerly search for “something special” that goes far beyond a much more prosaic attachment to the ordinary human condition, socially and culturally evolving out of a strictly material universe. This seems to me to be the fundamental underpinning of what people mistakenly call “spiritual needs”, that is the desire of the isolated individual lost in an enormous and frightening universe, to locate himself or herself inside a much more comforting environment, similar to that provided to infants in the mother’s womb, or to adult infants who enjoy living in patriarchal societies.

Accepting the material universe as it really is, and the human race’s relatively small place in it, is not just a cartesian error of perception caused by pitting strictly negative, primitive emotions against superior reason. Positive emotions do indeed exist, as exemplified in any individual’s socialized participation in any particular civilization, or period of history. No one just exists all alone in the physical universe, and everyone always completely depends on being surrounded by millions of other people without whom he or she could never survive. But adopting myths that alienate any particular community from material or social reality threatens collective survival, more or less in the same way that poisoning the natural environment also threatens individual and group survival.

Positive emotions like the well-known “Aha! experience”, that occasionally brightens the lives of such people as research scientists, inventors and other genuine innovators, are also totally necessary for human societies to better their condition over time. The concept known as progress is still as necessary as it ever was, if it does indeed result in truly sustainable development, socially and environmentally, and not just in some temporary, parochial gain reserved for a small group of privileged people. Real progress is totally dependent on positive emotions and positive goals, thoroughly grounded in the real world, and not on some immaterial, extra-terrestrial phantasm or another.

What we need to do is to stop looking for salvation, which is to say unreal, artificial, anthropomorphic, unintelligent “ways out”, or false solutions to our problems that do not really exist anywhere in the universe. No one anywhere has ever been able to find any real evidence for the existence of such ideologically constructed entities as “Christian science”, or “Islamic science”, or a “mandate from heaven”, or a “level playing field” for capital investment, or a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, or any other kind of invented nonsense that is supposed to make all our problems go away all by themselves. Nor should we try to convince ourselves that any country nowadays, or at any time in the past, has ever come close to achieving any real democracy, or any truly “libertarian-communist”, socialist, or social-democratic society genuinely promoting the interests of ordinary people. All over the world, since modern capitalism (whether private capitalism or state capitalism) replaced previous systems of elitist rule, such as feudalism, all human societies have been governed for the almost exclusive benefit of elite investors. Which means that slogans like “democracy” and “socialism” are most often every bit as chimeric as any of the other false prophecies already listed.

Various governments in every region have often claimed to represent the majority of the people, but it ought to be obvious to everyone that at no time or place have any majorities, such as industrial workers, or service workers, ever had a government that always acted in their best interests. Instead, a very small minority of rich and/or powerful people have usually managed to rule the roost, no matter what the official belief system was supposed to be. Slogans like the ones cited above are all just concepts invented by clever professionals in order to misgovern masses of mainly downtrodden and exploited people.

Like the hundreds of millions of industrial workers in Asia, Africa and Latin America, who have largely replaced the industrial working-class in the West, in order to push labor costs way down and therefore to boost the profit margins of “post-industrial” financiers. These newer workers are better off than the hundreds of millions of other people in the former Third World who have remained poor peasants, but they do not earn nearly enough to justify their official inclusion in the “middle class”, which is just another false idea invented by pro-business politicians supporting neoliberal austerity. Once again, none of the philosophically idealist projections of ordinary political discourse exist as such in the real world. All of them have been made up by professional sycophants (lobbyists, PR specialists and other madmen from the artificial world of publicity). Even in “communist” countries like the People’s Republic of China is still officially supposed to be.

This was precisely the point being made in another little book that I read recently, Les passagers clandestins: Métaphores et trompe-l’oeil de l’économie (2016). This  book was written by Ianic Marcil, an independent economist specializing in social justice, who explains quite nicely how all the laissez-faire and neoliberal economists who have dominated that profession since the days of Adam Smith, have managed to invent dozens of completely unreal slogans to keep people from finding out what is really going on. Slogans like “the invisible hand”, “the law of supply and demand”, “general equilibrium”, “the creation of wealth”, “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and “there is no such thing as society”, were all designed to promote the idea that everything that big business does is necessarily good for everyone all the time.

The title slogan in that book, “free rider” (“le passager clandestin”), is most often used nowadays by austerity-minded governments to justify their incredibly arrogant claim that everyone (even poor people) have to “do their part” in order to “balance the budget”. While at the same time competing with each other to cut taxes way down for rich people, and then allowing all the world’s most important banks and multinational corporations to avoid paying even those taxes that still theoretically remain.

But my point about the invention of slogans to make problems go away by denying their very existence is not just confined to PR specialists from the world of official economics. Another book that I read recently, or rather re-read a newer version of an older classic, makes methodologically similar points about a very different subject, from a radically different point of view. This was Benedict Anderson’s incredibly well-researched book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, originally published in 1983 and updated in 2006. Unlike most of the other writers about the origins of nationalist ideology, with their common emphasis on a strictly European genesis, Anderson argues that nationalism started out in the (North and South) American colonies of the various European empires, before being adopted by popular movements in the rising European nation-states, then by the imperialist powers themselves, and finally by the anti-imperialist resistance movements in Asia and Africa. In other words, as I found out myself by doing the preliminary research for my own doctoral dissertation (UQAM,1991) on Canadian economic nationalism in the nineteenth century, nationalism came into being as a result of European imperial expansion into the rest of the world, and not just as a post-feudal ideological development within Europe itself.

But Anderson’s main contribution to our understanding of this extremely important secular religion is in fact quite similar to that of another one of my favourite authors, David Lowenthal, in his book, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996). Both of these extremely well-informed authors emphasized the enormous contrast between the fake, or imagined, histories invented by the political elites of each emerging nation, from the fifteenth century onward, and the real histories of what genuinely took place during the development of each separate, nationalist ideology. What the “founding fathers” of each national identity claimed to be doing, as well as what each official interpretation of events currently offers in commemoration of each such national origin, are most often largely fictionalized accounts of heroic, patriarchal, ego-projections. The most well-known example being the thoroughly hypocritical “fight for liberty and freedom” that was waged against the British Empire during the “American Revolution” of 1775-1783, led by liberal-minded slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Another book that I read recently was even more radically different from the ones so far mentioned, namely Mathieu Bock-Côté’s Le multiculturalisme comme religion politique (2016). Bock-Côté is a relatively young, self-proclaimed conservative nationalist, promoting Quebec independence from a Gaullist perspective. Personally, I can see no reason why anyone would want to be a conservative nationalist, given the universal tendency of that particular point of view to identify with obscurantism on the one hand, and imperialism on the other. It seems to me that nationalism only becomes a positive force when it can be used as a rallying cry against someone else’s empire, in order to build a vibrant, productive, locally-based economy, and to ensure that everyone who resides within the borders of that nation benefits from universal, social-democratic programs aimed at instituting a successful redistribution of national wealth.

Be that as it may, Bock-Côté instead wrote a rather long-winded compendium of the points of view of dozens of well-known, conservative-minded French authors about the dangers of what they perceive to be the current politically-correct tendency in the West to downplay the cultural contributions of Western civilization, the European nation-state and the Enlightenment. According to them, politically-correct people concentrate instead on the promotion of the human rights of all sorts of minority groups, especially non-European religious and ethnic minorities living in the West.

Bock-Côté then tries to show that this multicultural globalization trend is nothing but a post-communist plot, a political invention of the “radical sixties” generation in order to help left-wingers get over their abandonment by the industrial working-class, that used to be so hugely important in all the Western countries. He writes as if he really believes that left-wing socialists and sociologists from the hippie counter-culture successfully took over all Western political discourse since the 1960s, and resolutely steered it towards a hegemonic, anti-colonial and anti-Western “third way” ideology, neither capitalist nor communist. As he describes it, these same deconstructionist demagogues also deliberately invented anti-racism in order to replace stable, republican democracy with anarchic, multiple-minority rule, subverting the social harmony of all the Western nation-states in the balance!

Incredibly, Bock-Côté was able to write 299 pages of this kind of vitriol before arriving at his first, very brief, mention of neoliberalism, that he rejects in spite of its official opposition to socialism, because it is also too materialistic, and indifferent to human passions as well as to historical traditions. However, dismissing neoliberalism in one or two sentences, in a 366-page book, is unbelievably naive and short-sighted. In reality, the globalization and the multiculturalism that Bock-Côté denounces all the time, were specific consequences of the rise of neoliberalism, the world’s dominant ideology since Margaret Thatcher first adopted Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek’s totally individualist worldview back in 1979. It was neoliberalism, much more than radical socialism, that invented all the tendencies that Bock-Côté hates the most.

More importantly, economic liberalism, also called laissez-faire as well as neoliberalism, was simultaneously “rediscovered” by the same finance-capitalist monetarists who broke the inflation crisis of the 1970s by raising interest rates 400% and thus deliberately creating the world-wide recession of the 1980s. All the other neoliberal policies (privatization of previously nationalized companies, government austerity for poor people, financial speculation, delocalization, removing the barriers to investment banking controls set up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, etc.) were then put into place in an ongoing attempt to enforce complete and total finance-capitalist control of the entire world economy. The result of which was the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the continuing stagnation of the world economy since then.

The globalization and the multiculturalism so disliked by Bock-Côté were not really part of any imagined, idealistic, socialist plot to take over Western society, they were much more a necessary part of a materialistic, capitalist “open conspiracy” to take over the whole world. Unfortunately, people like Bock-Côté still like to think in old-fashioned terms of philosophical idealism, as if political ideas come into being exclusively through the influence of creative thinkers, without any contamination by material considerations. These people deliberately ignore the fact that all the official religions and ideologies adopted during each succeeding epoch were really developed in order to serve the interests of rich and/or powerful people (slaveowners, feudal aristocrats, leading investors of private or state capital), dominating the poor and the powerless in various different ways.

The other major shortcoming of Bock-Côte's book was the total absence of any kind of comparison between “Western values” and those of all the “Eastern” civilizations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the first place, it ought to be obvious to everyone nowadays that none of the Western countries, not only the more powerful ones such as Britain and the USA that founded vast political and economic empires over the past several centuries, but also the less powerful ones (such as Canada and Australia), have never really been very convincing practitioners of the values considered to be “Western”.

These so-called Western values that many wishful thinkers would like to see become universal values at some point, such as political and social democracy, equality between men and women, separation of Church and State, protection of minorities, and so on, have only become important parts of official Western identity since the second half of the twentieth century. Besides having entered in varying degrees into both official and popular identity-definitions of the Western countries over the past several decades, none of those values have ever been systematically put into practice, not so much in any of the “homeland” countries and definitely not in any of the colonial or neocolonial regions that the West used to dominate, or still dominates nowadays. Most of those values have also been deliberately rejected from time to time in many Western countries, not only by countries like Italy and Germany during the fascist period, but also by thousands of very popular neofascist politicians and movements nowadays.

That being said, however, no one should think that any of the other modern civilizations, in the formerly colonial or neocolonial regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America, have done any better than the Western countries in either ideologically promoting, or truly observing, any of those same values. This is not just because, as several historians have claimed, that before the rise of Western imperialism many non-Western parts of the world were spontaneously developing “democratic” or “socialist” tendencies, that were then systematically destroyed by the Western invaders. In fact, when I was preparing and periodically updating my course on the history of the Third World that I gave for several decades, I got the impression instead that it would be closer to reality to claim that prior to the Western invasions, none of the non-Western neolithic societies or urban-based civilizations ever truly developed any of the so-called Western values mentioned above.

When I was also preparing and updating my course on the history of Western civilization that I gave even more often than the one on the Third World, I also got the impression that prior to the modern or contemporary periods of history, the European countries themselves never really came close either. Ancient Greek democracy, for example, was confined to only one or two cities, and lasted no more than a century and a half, hardly typical of the thousand-year period of Greek civilization prior to its forced incorporation into the Roman Empire. As for the Roman Republic, I was never able to find anything that justified the claims that some other authors made for the existence of genuine democratic tendencies there either. Instead, I agree with the revisionist historians that many of the traditional histories of Western civilization were often marred by systematic anachronisms.

Certainly, the Western empires during the colonial period of history did everything they could, officially and unofficially, to control or to crush any of the numerous attempts at rebellion against their rule, or what eventually came to be called the national liberation movements during the twentieth century. Towards the end of that period, there were even a few, usually feeble, attempts to eradicate what some people in the West now call “barbaric cultural practices” in the non-Western countries, such as the Hindu practice of sati. Since the nationalist elites replaced the imperialist elites at the end of the colonial period, many other attempts, sometimes less feeble, have also been made to get rid of many of those same practices.

Nowadays, many of those nationalist governments are still desperately trying to rid their countries of such abominations as using the death penalty to punish apostasy, forced marriages of young girls with much older men, slavery, excision, honour killings and a hundred other similar practices. In other parts of the former Third World, however, various different kinds of ultra-authoritarian, neofascist movements are attempting to turn back the clock again, imitating or anticipating similar ultra-conservative, fundamentalist movements in the West. These antediluvian organizations include the so-called Islamic State movement, but also well-established governments like the one in Saudi Arabia. The majority Muslim countries (Sunni and Shiite) are particularly afflicted with this reactionary disease, but such atavistic movements are also quite popular once again among some Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist populations, as well as among many other ultra-authoritarian, paternalist ideologies, of nationalist or ethnic origins.

It ought not to be presumed, however, that these barbaric cultural practices exist only in non-Western countries. Slavery, for example, was very much a part of most Western societies until relatively recently, much longer in fact than is usually admitted. Even today, various Western governments and multinational corporations are guilty of, or at least complicit in, allowing such practices to continue to exist in many different parts of the world, as well as among diaspora populations immigrating into the West from those same regions. But allowing such abominations to continue to exist inside relatively “enlightened” countries, or even to encourage such behaviour in order to falsely “accommodate diversity”, is a particularly dangerous and disgusting strategy.

Moreover, many Western countries have gone a step farther into iniquity by inventing some newer forms of barbarism, such as dropping bombs on civilian populations from the air. Since the beginning of the Second World War, Western countries have used it to kill many millions more people using this method than have all the other regions of the world put together. Since the end of the Cold War, a more sophisticated American method of killing people from the air, known as the drone, has also done a lot more “collateral damage” than is usually admitted.

Since 1939, the number of people killed by the West from the air, in various different regions, has only been matched by the number of Chinese people killed for political reasons within their own country, in much more prosaic, old-fashioned ways, such as provoked starvation, during the first three decades of the People’s Republic. But the equally barbaric food weapon has also been used even more recently, by the United Nations this time, under mostly Western influence, during the 1991-2003 “boycott” of the Hussein regime in Iraq. In assessing the impact of various different religions and ideologies on relatively recent world events, admitting the pertinence to the argument of such basely “material” developments as those given above cannot be arbitrarily excluded if we want to make any real sense of the whole discussion.

Given all these things, and others like them, I obviously cannot agree with Bock-Côte's decision not to include any of this background information into his analysis. The Western world does not live in total isolation from the rest of the world, not now and not in fact, ever, no matter how far back we go into history. Many of the conservative French authors he cited in his book were obviously very much influenced by the post-1945 influx of millions of former colonial peoples into much of the Western world, and by atavistic tendencies rising up (not always spontaneously) among those populations. In fact, the ultra-conservative writings and media pronouncements of all the Western reactionaries have influenced, and been influenced by, similar writings and public declarations on the part of all the world’s non-Western reactionaries. Each group of “radicalized” neofascist ideologues feeds off all the others, in a world-wide spiral of increasingly barbaric points of view, rushing down together toward oblivion inside that ideological black hole known as ultra-conservative populism.

As a result, I cannot agree either with Bock-Côte’s opinion that people nowadays should stop supporting the rights of minority groups so much, not only in the West but also in the rest of the world, in order to bring back the (fictitious) days of the harmonious nation-state. Neither Western neofascism nor “Eastern” neofascism, inside functioning nation-states or inside failed states, deserves anyone’s support. In my opinion, progressive people everywhere should be united in their concerted opposition to any of the different ways in which some human beings persist in horribly mistreating other human beings. So far as I can tell, it is still the divisions between the social classes that result in more suffering from needless death and destruction than any other kind of division, with gender divisions coming in a close second so far as causing much of human misery and mistreatment, while the rotten treatment of ethnic and religious minorities is only the third most important part of the analytical pattern. However, none of those “different kinds” of sadomasochistic social behaviour in fact separate out well within real-life situations, and are almost always all mixed up together. Fighting against one of them means fighting against all of them.

Unfortunately, it is often quite difficult to do that without getting bogged down in many different real-life situations. For example, when it comes to tolerating minorities, progressive movements and governments all over the world cannot simply bend over backwards trying to accommodate every exaggerated demand that people from every ethnic and religious minority that exists could possibly want to impose on them. Even politically correct people have to live with “radicalized” manipulation of minority populations and the often unintended consequences of adopting a naive attitude toward every possible demand.

The most obvious example of this kind of thing is the completely hypocritical and opportunistic strategy that has currently been foisted on unsuspecting liberals in the Western countries by the Islamist tendency, currently corrupting large and growing numbers of people all over the world. Those horrible people have quite explicitly opted to use the politically-correct rejection of “Islamophobia” in order to further their own neofascist agenda. On the one hand, they temporarily pretend to support the “rights of minorities” whenever they find themselves in a minority situation, as long as the only minority being accommodated is their own. At the same time, in countries where Muslims are in the majority, the Islamists there totally refuse to accept any tolerance of non-Muslim minorities among them, and instead try everything they can to get rid of those “foreign elements” forever, by driving them out of the country, or simply by killing every last one of them.

In other words, the international movement of Islamic-fascist organizations is not the least bit interested in any kind of universal tolerance of ethnic or religious minorities as a principle. What they want to do instead, and they have been extremely forthcoming about this, is to use the tolerance of minorities as a temporary slogan, whenever they feel that it is strategically useful to do so. Their ultimate goal, repeated over and over again on every possible occasion, is to take over the entire world, in the process hypocritically forcing everyone to become as Islamic as they are, and thereby doing away with all religious minorities forever. In that sense, they are a lot like the Nazi Party in Germany, before they took over that country, who used the liberal-democratic laws and judgements of the social-democratic Weimar Republic (1918-1933), until they (the Nazis) became powerful enough to do away with democracy altogether, for a time.

But the Islamic fascists are not the only ultra-authoritarian movement that acts in this fashion. “Radicalized” people in dozens of other ultra-right-wing movements, all over the Western world as well as all over the rest of the world, are also guilty of the same kind of strategy. Many Christian activists in the West also temporarily support minority rights for Muslims in the extremely dangerous belief that the Islamic militants within the Muslim minority will become “the thin edge of the wedge” for bringing Western societies themselves back to the kind of near-total religious domination that used to exist in all the Western countries several decades ago. These sorcerer’s apprentices foolishly seem to think that they can manipulate everyone involved toward bringing about some kind of future Christian victory over mankind, which is ultimately very similar to the apocalyptic Islamist phantasm.

The neoliberal movement is also playing with fire in the same excessively dangerous fashion. Not to mention dozens of other right-wing nationalist, imperialist/or and ethnic racists based in many different parts of the world. Completely self-centred thinking has also become much more popular than before, even among aboriginal, “First Nations” native peoples, like those in the USA and many other countries who reject even anthropological testing of recently-discovered, 9000 year old skeletons lest they reveal something that those obscurantists also do not want to uncover.

Once again, we unfortunately find ourselves in another period of history dominated by various religious and ideological reactionaries who want everyone else to conform to their own heteronymic ways of thinking. Increasing numbers of people all over the world are simultaneously trying to impose their own particular brands of reductionist “salvation” on everyone else, in a time when what all we humans really need to do is to develop genuinely universal values that are not based on one group’s domination over another.