From Lauren: “this rap by Hedges should go on web, it really says a lot a what is wrong and yet sustains an alternative-space for a CT of rel.”
From Lauren: “this rap by Hedges should go on web, it really says a lot a what is wrong and yet sustains an alternative-space for a CT of rel.”
The increasing institutionalization of religion (with its moral bankruptcy) which Hedges describes is nothing new. Historically, it has been counterbalanced by prophetic sectarian movements which challenge their hegemony. However, these sectarian movements can not only from the left but from the right and we should be careful of what we wish for. Getting back to core religious values sounds like a good idea but values driven to their extreme have unintended consequences. What is lacking in the West, at this historical juncture, is social movements challenging the “irrationality of rationalization” (whether with Goldman or BP). Watered down reform is coming from above. Social movements are not likely to begin within institutionalized religion (although the possiblity does exist). Secular social movements can be just as religious as religious movements (and just as zealous). What is needed is a more critical, rational social movement which needs to self-consciously reflect on both its means and its ends to bring about more substantial progressive social change.
The article reads like a journalistic rant to me, the referencing to Nietzsche is a naïve and anachronistic, and there is a lack of any Euro perspective. The article is totally American, but from outside of the US, many would see Americanism as the problem, not the solution or having the solution; “Americanism” is the name for the globalization of commodity capitalism, and the wrecking of every locale it can get into. The take on the churches and denominations in the article was totally American too. There is more to the churches in many places than sex-abuse scandals, even in Ireland and Germany. But this measuring everything in statistics, relying on journalism, and leveling complexities to flattened out slogan-like statements is again, more American than European in ethos.
I wouldn’t call this social critical theory or take it seriously at all.
Re Warrens commment. I agree, there are no alternative voices which speak for a group or may be rallying points of solidarity, like when Marxist theory was alive and well; instead there is an individualist clamour where each one wants his or her own remedy adopted.
The Catholic church has always been morally bankrupt for Protestants, that is the basis of their “protest” since the 16th century, but Catholics are a growing group and a self-discplined group in that they form one church which is beholden to no nation or corporation nor is ruled like America, by the dollar. It would be hasty to underestimate the power of the church or its meaning for the future – the Catholic church I mean, not the Protestant churches which are a form of spiritual disarray and capitulation to all sorts of other forces, as Hedges and Warren have pointed out.
The Protestant churches have always been in a state of disarray: quaking, shaking, etc. (not only to be glib but actually to point up a perpetual tension in institutional Protestantism, which has surely been influential despite or because of the disarray).
Does Hedges even want to do ‘critical social theory’ and must all writers do whatever that is?
But yes, it must surely be true that the Americanism problem is that Hedges is an individualist in the bones. Coming as he does from a ‘liberal fragment culture’ (cf. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies) this is not surprising.
But do we have to minimize or deny the intensity of the moral outrage Hedges is expressing, or is it more a question of showing its deeper relation to the structural and collective dimensions of capitalism – how this context far exceeds and overdetermines moral action as such in a one-dimensional society. More deeply than Hedges, who wants to keep his distracted readership’s unbroken attention, ever seems to go.
Yes, If you want to see how altogether bankrupt traditional religion has become just check out the unmitigated awfulness at the various First Things blogs—where the chap above is celebrated.