Religion and the Left: A Reply to McManus

“The ideas of the Right are more powerful precisely because they are more primitive. Fraternity between differing religious, racial, and linguistic communities is of greater abstraction than fraternizing with one’s co-religionist and inter-linguistic community.”

In “Why the Left Needs to Think About Religion (And Other Big Questions),” Matt McManus identifies the inability of the Left, as compared to the Right, to address the question of meaning in the lives of people. I think the identification of meaning as a central political concept is indeed a central and pertinent observation—and one that I also hold. The claim that meaning, broadly spoken about here, is the nexus within which political debate is occurring—and from which agency is being animated in the polis— runs radically opposed to 20th century political philosophy where economics (class struggle and free markets) and liberty were the central terms of reference. Indeed, the 20th century was, in the political sense, an aberration from history, and the re-emergence of “reciprocal” (the family, the nation, the religious community, etc.) units of belonging is perhaps a return to the natural state of Man. However, the transformations of political consciousness, in the 19th and 20th centuries occurred for a reason: this being the structural, social, intellectual, and economic movement of history known as modernism.

Modernism is too complex a phenomenon to be neatly summed by caricatures (often ideological), such as modernism as the triumph of secularism, reason, and science. Rather than speaking concretely about the outcomes of the process of modernization, it is better to think of it as a prioritizing of rational reflection. Spoken of in terms of authority, the self-authority of reason begins to force the recasting and recharacterization of values. The secular is not anti-religious; rather, it is a religiosity negotiated by reason (thus Kant is able to speak of a historical-unreflective religion and compare it to a rational-enlightened religion). Similarly, science, defined in terms of causal explanations of events in the world, is transformed by reason to beget a wholly naturalistic explanation of events: “It is not God, but a psychotic episode brought about by chemical imbalances in the brain, that explains the voice in one’s head.” And so on and so forth. In all of these transformations, the historically-held view of a particular thing is critiqued and thereby altered.

When an evaluation of modernization is offered by those who think that modernization was a bad thing, they will inevitably point to the death of traditional meaning. As it turns out, rational critique is apparently somewhat acidic: leaving little, if anything, remaining at its touch. “Disenchantment,” which is hailed as a rationalization of nature (bringing forth such things as the scientific method), hands Man the world, but one which has lost all its meaning. In this sense, the traditionalist, which, within this context, might refer to the conservative Right, with an air of condescension, is able to point out the apparent, ultimate failure of the modernist system of thought, which has eroded its very own imaginative and symbolic world of meaning.