Secularism as social control, the culture industry of Disenchantment

Secularism is the new mythos manufactured by the culture industry. Paul Tyson, in his book  Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times, (now only 2.99 on kindle) writes,

“The Christian maintains that the passive acceptance of culturally constructed errors regarding reality will result in false valuations, false loyalties, and futile and destructive lifestyles. Such error results in idolatrous impiety in the living of one’s life. So to philosophical and religious people, metaphysical incoherence, and treating metaphysics simply as an entirely natural function of the vested power structures and operational norms of any society, cannot be mildly accepted...

“But . . . what if it is really the real world that Christian doctrine is concerned with, and what if the value-neutral mechanical determinism of secular reality is in fact something of a bizarre fantasy that is not, after all, faithful to reality?”

These operational norms and the assumptions about the nature of reality that go with them are at least partly shaped by the vested power interests of those who govern us. Thus shared reality beliefs are intimately enmeshed in the necessary power structures, with all their vested interests, in which we live.

 ....it may well be that those power structures are as interested in promoting zones of illusion that hide oppression within our assumed understanding of reality as they are in facilitating the true flourishing, freedom, and dignity of our lives. Those who never question the realities with which they are presented are easily controlled by those who set up the power structures and wield influence in any given society. ”

“Increasingly a deep cultural unknowing regarding what the point and meaning of our wondrous objective knowledge and manipulative power might be is now a pervasive background feature of our cultural life form. This leaves us at the mercy of the brazen manipulative irrealism and the morally unconstrained instrumentalism of consumer culture. The vested power interests native to pragmatic consumerism delight in playing with our subjective beliefs and molding our objective behaviors to suit its merely instrumental ends. Market realism and the mass media age thrives on generating seductive ready-made consumer identities saturated in powerful illusions that prime our fantasies of desire and manipulate our inchoate fears, and all for the meaningless “point” of getting us to spend money.

 Once we are out of touch with thinking about moral and spiritual reality it does not take long for us to get out of touch with material reality as well (think of speculative trading and the non-material bubble worlds possible within cyberspace). The escapism, narcissism, and virtual brilliance of our powerful entertainment industry, and a flagrant disregard for the physical environment on which our very lives depend, is also characteristic of our times. ”“

For now we have power without wisdom or piety, existence without nobility, lives without any transcendently referenced point, birth and death without intrinsic meaning, time and seasons without liturgical reference, holidays without the holy. (Though, of course, we do have very fancy and cheap flat screen TVs.) Now the West has unleashed enormous instrumental and military forces on the globe and has built a set of global structures that facilitate unprecedented economic and material exploitation; but all this power is directed to no common good, to no intrinsically valuable end. Under this situation, if we have no sense of accountability to any moral truth or any sacred meaning in how we govern the world, then we may drag the whole world down into the West’s spiritual bog and visit unprecedented destruction on the entire globe in the process. ”

For what different discourses of power consider as real and knowable, and what they do not perceive and thus label as unreal and unknowable, has enormous importance on how we actually live. Disciplines of desire and character formation are naturally aligned with the tacit collective goals of any given life form, and these goals are only visible within shared frames of belief, and those shared frames of belief have deep leverage on our way of life because they are richly, imaginatively, and allegorically constructed.

Yet ironically—as Nietzsche himself understood—any view of reality that is only defined within the order of the tangibly apparent, the empirical realm, is just as much imaginatively constructed and a shared frame of belief as are outlooks situated within a metaphysically three-dimensional frame of belief. Formation in any collective belief alignment is deeply mytho-poetic and happens below the conscious and “adult radar of our stated metaphysical convictions. The metaphysical formation that we absorb from the stories and ideas of our culture’s collective imagination become the background cultural wallpaper of any given way of life. 

Thus, typically unknown to us, it is the distinctive narratives and particular imaginative landscapes of our culture that shape our sympathies, our apathies, and our social norms. These deep narratives discipline our desires and motivate our actions. 

Thus, the visibilities and invisibilities thrown up by a culture’s mytho-poetic outlook shape its most basic moral and political framework.

Yet this dynamic of the normalization of exploitation via the techniques of skillfully-crafted marketing illusions and production invisibilities. . . almost any tradeable commodity—is tied to a deep cultural belief that makes the modern Western consumer way of life work. 

The belief that makes it all work is that public facts and material things are objective and have no inherent value or meaning, for values and meanings are matters of personal preference and are thus up to individuals to select for themselves. And that belief is a function of a one-dimensional metaphysical outlook where only objects that you can see and touch are really real.”

 …it is the functional assumption that meanings and values are not part of objective reality but are rather essentially personal and cultural constructions that means that financial and objective “realism” trumps personal and cultural values and meanings, without us even noticing that there is a contest.

“this way of seeing and acting easily makes abstract fantasies (such as money) into real objects, and embodied normative realities (such as human dignity) into abstract fantasies. But if there is only one dimension to reality then both money and human dignity are equally artifices of manipulation, and there is no meaningful way of saying why one of them is more intrinsically important than the other.” 

"Yet it is Nietzsche who makes the remarkable claim that the very notion of validly interpreted historical truth is essentially mythic, and that mythos is always prior to logos—and modern logos is no exception.

….he was particularly sensitive to the fact that all thinking and all human action is only meaningful to us because of words. But words are very fragile and malleable things. Their meanings are a function of culturally situated use, and all cultural and historical situations are contingent and shifting artifacts of imagination, desire, and power, and provide us with no fixed or objectively factual grounding in truth.

Mythos—as a richly imaginative store of pre/super-rational culturo-linguistically embedded meanings—is seen by both thinkers as the grounds of human logos. That is, human reason is not the grounds of truth and any human picture of truth is grounded itself in something more basic than itself.

“…the modern worldview is just as imbedded in mythos as any other worldview. Collective imaginative narratives are not optional extras that cultures may or may not have; they are inherent to human culture and linguistically expressed human reason. As such mythos always gives rise to and shapes the understanding of reason (logos) that any given cultural life form largely accepts."

As David Bentley Hart says, 

"So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”

Hart also explicates just how we got here,

“With its ambition to perfect a method of pure induction, it proposed to the imagination the idea of a “real” physical world hidden behind the apparent one, an occult realm of pure material causation, utterly devoid of all the properties of mind, most especially intentional purposes.

 From at least the time of Galileo, a division was introduced between what Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” — between, that is, the phenomenal world we experience and that imperceptible order of purely material forces that composes its physical substrate. And, at least at first, the divorce was amicable, inasmuch as phenomenal qualities were still granted a certain legitimacy; they were simply surrendered to the custody of the immaterial soul. But mind was now conceived as an exception within the frame of nature.

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. 

And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

The manifest image was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order.

Rather, however, than attempt to explain nature in terms of a “mind-like” order of rational relations, as Aristotelian tradition did, Dennett seeks to do very nearly the opposite: to reduce mind and nature alike to a computational system…

Perhaps the mind inhabits a real Platonic order of being, where ideal forms express themselves in phenomenal reflections, while the scientific image — a mechanistic regime devoid of purpose and composed of purely particulate causes, stirred only by blind, random impulses — is a fantasy, a pale abstraction decocted from the material residues of an immeasurably richer reality.”

Hart's “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity.

Elsewhere he makes this point about the function of disenchanted atheism in society :

"This, I think, is how one must finally understand the popular atheist vogue that has opened so lucrative a niche market in recent years: it is an expression of what a Marxist might call the “ideological superstructure” of consumerism. Rather than something daring, provocative, and revolutionary, it is really the rather insipid residue of the long history of capitalist modernity, and its chief impulse – as well as its chief moral deficiency – its bourgeois respectability.

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. 

Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods.

Our sacred wit is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of our social universe: the price tag.

So it was really only a matter of time before atheism slipped out of the enclosed gardens of acadame and down from the vertiginous eyries of high cosmopolitan fashion and began expressing itself in crassly vulgar form. It was equally inevitable that, rather than boldly challenging the orthodoxies of its age, it would prove to be just one more anodyne item on sale in the shops, and would be enthusiastically feted by a vapid media culture not especially averse to the idea that there are no ultimate values, but only final prices.

In a sense, the triviality of the movement is its chief virtue. It is a diverting alternative to thinking deeply. It is a narcotic. In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tantalizing toys.”

The Experience of God, 312-313).

We have never been disenchanted. Magic never disappeared. Weber himself was steeped in mysticism. Rather, modernity is a case of rival “Enchantments".

The Myth of Disenchantment, by Jason Joseph Storm, explores this as well, Storm says, 

“I would like to emphasize that the secular is not primarily a subtraction of religion. Put in Hegelian terms, the secular results from an ongoing “sublation” (Auhebung) of religion, which it simultaneously encapsulates, transforms and opposes. 

Some secular concepts represent the transposition of religious concepts into a new key or configuration at the very moment they are presented as oppositional.

In the European case, Christian theological concepts were repurposed to point directly to the state instead of God, e.g. the transposition summarized in the phrase vox populi, vox dei… 

For Foucault, truth is the active expression of a society’s system of “knowledge-power” and therefore science-centric discourse is nevertheless deeply entangled with political and economic concerns. In part, what this demonstrates is that ideology is not merely a false consciousness, but that science (or perhaps scientism) actually furthers the consolidation of species ideologies and secularism in

particular.

The combination of science and ideology determines the architecture of what appears to be possible—both physically and politically. It gives form to secular appeals to practicality and determines the contours of the “worldliness” to which secularism is directed.

The secular is generally presented as the real and the other as the allegory. Put another way, secularization produces doppelgangers—one marked as actual and the other as phantasm, e.g. political sovereignty (framed as real) and divine sovereignty (framed as allegorical or irrelevant). 

Additionally, I note that European scientistic discourse in the nineteenth century brought with it a particular aesthetic impulse toward something called “reality” or “realism.”

This aesthetic, more than anything found in science itself, serves to affect cultural transformations beyond any scientifically verifiable claims. On its own, this produces some of the effects described as part of secularization.

Insofar as the secular resets on its oppositions, it is often unnamed but marked instead as the non-religious, non-superstitious, or simply real politics. But what counts as “real” at a given moment is historically contingent. 

In Marxist terms each new class “has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.” 

                                                         sexy Adorno