America's therapeutic 'spiritual' ideologies as a depoliticizing Protestantism (with hints of alternatives)

A society in which the therapeutic has triumphed over the political as a mode of engagement between self and society will of course be one in which governance has triumphed over the political. Such as society will be truly totalitarian and could not be called a democracy, even if people still vote in contested elections for their rulers. 

This is what went wrong in the early 1970s when with the "New Age," the political contestations that had so defined the 1960s evaporated, and in their place was now only various "spiritual," health-and-ecology oriented, and therapeutic practices of perfecting the self in the interest of some vague happiness that would be the sole object of projects of personal success, the only kind of projects a depoliticizing society would have much will to tolerate. In this context, the over-sold "return of religion" was completely understandable. Just as it would be that the new focuses of radicalism would be not just lifestyles but specifically gender and sexuality.

For a brief time, that perhaps lasted for the slightly more than single decade between Kent State and Woodstock at the start and the discovery of AIDS in 1982, everyone who had nothing better to believe in seemed to think that there was a compelling moral truth that all must recognize, and it consisted of nothing more nor less than the answer to the question, "What is your sexuality?" Or rather perhaps, "What is the secret truth of your sexuality, and why aren't you true to it? Isn't that what you 'want'?" What else can you possible want to be, have, or do but the objects of your 'desire' which would be persons understood and defined basically in terms of--what kind of fucking?

At the same, at least one truly political motif, perfectly consistent with the sexual revolutions, that persistently would be asserted was: My demographical tribe is 'oppressed' and by 'they' or 'you', if you don't belong to it. This was a banalization of the political perfectly suited to a culture of a newfound war of all against almost all the rest. The conjunction of this motif with feminism and gay liberation worked because these are in every instance always a matter of private affairs. A dominant cultural meme would be: we are oppressed, and necessarily, and so should be outraged, always; we should complain (about you, whom we are faced with, to the anonymous authorities who run the (government, company, university, etc.) in an impersonal way that enables us to appeal to them). Everything offends everyone who is "political" in this way.

This is not radicalism, but madness. And not in the sense of an illness, but the sense of nonsense, useless excess, and folly. Folly is the madness curable by reason, and in this way is utterly distinct from mental illness. If someone is mentally ill, they are an irreperable alien, and might as well be exterminated like a cockroach. That is the thinking, whatever people say. And this has been done; Kafka did not live to see it but could imagine, knowing the hatred. The names of the others whose alien character makes them intolerable within the body politic will change. In an American fascism, it would not be Jews, at least not under that name. But other names exist and can be found.

But what must also said about this therapeutic hyper-psychological culture is simply this: It is in fact Christian and specifically Protestant. Moreover, it draws on deep strains of American Protestant spirituality including the New England Transcendalists, particularly Henry David Thoreau, who is echoed in contemporary books by American psycho-spiritual gurus. Why is it Protestant, if not, the effective use of the ‘love’ ideology being here of uncertain status, Christian?

It involves an idea of God that is disavowed.

It promotes a personal spirituality free of institutions.

It elevates personal success, and a blind pursuit of happiness.

But above all, its ideas of the self/world/God nexus are Christian and not Jewish. This is because in Judaism God did not create a perfected world but one people are called on to improve. He does not want people to just adapt themselves, or to just try to save themselves individually, maybe along with their family and some friends. And above all:

The Jewish God is not one of management. That is the point of view that makes possible the above. There is a relationship to time and history, and society and world, that renders unsatisfactory any approach to living in the world that is just about perfecting one's own consciousness. In all of the New Age, where is the idea of justice? And what authorizes any politics? The answer to these questions is certain things, to be sure, but they are rather thin. Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism-- the three strands of traditional Chinese ethical and aesthetic thought--provide an excellent basis for management, since the fundamental idea at least of the originally Chinese components (Buddhism is Indo-European in origin; it is as "Aryan" as anything in the Greek religion that rapidly disappeared after the advent of democracy, mathematics, and philosophy) is one of order and harmony as the essence of the good.

Christianity and Islam both differ from Judaism partly in being more authoritarian, and part of the reason is that the social world is conceived by them as essentially static. This is partly because God is overly patriarchalized as a figure of paternal authority and cosmic origin (the Greek arche figures both), and the world is essentially regarded as a produced thing. A produced commodity is perfect in the original sense of that term, which is thoroughly made. Christianity then identified its God with the State while at the same allowing a certain slippage. And this makes for all of the variations from left to right in Christian politics over the centuries between affirming that the ruler of the state represents and is identifiable with God (as our courtrooms declare in a sign posted on every courtroom wall as well as the witness's oath to tell the absolute truth), one the one hand, and emphasizing God's difference from secular realities (at the price of idolatry itself, the object of Judaism's most fundamental and characteristic protest), so that in effect: a party or faction claiming to be of God might be radically conservative or radically revolutionary. It could take the side of Antigone or of Creon; or, as in Hegel, both.

Society is generally conceived in Christianity under the figure of totality, which is because it is identified with the state. Indeed, "society" arguably derives whatever consistency and coherence it may have as a form from the fact that it is what the state represents. To understand this, we must be nominalist enough to recognize that some other conceptualization would render the thing represented so that it would in fact be different to us, and realist enough to recognize that conceptual names generally do correspond to worldly referents that can be exhibited; they are representatives of them.

Because world is conceived as static, society as totality identified with the state, and God's transcendence as that of mastery (he owns and controls the real estate of Being, so to speak, and so too is master of all that will happen as well as that did and does), social problems and conflicts wind up most readily in Christian societies being reduced to individualization. It becomes much harder to claim any injustice being done to you by some finite particular agentive or structural subject whose dominion is only partial. Truth is, you will be told, it's just you, just about you. Your problems are only about you. Denying or protesting this, you could even be accused of the hubris of not recognizing that whoever accuses you, if they have sufficient authority, is on the side of the All. All people, all of Being, whatever. The individual soul and his salvation or damnation as the principal concern of Christianity, which is the fundamental ethical motif in all of its forms, this is possible because world or society as totality are perfect, being created by God, and the only imperfection in the cosmos (Being as order) is individuals with their original sins. And so Christianity does not want to perfect the world. Fundamentally, it just wants people to obey.

I say to everyone who prefers "the East" to the Christian, Roman, or other "West": Your propose shift or addition does not change this but makes it worse. What would be better, as replacement or supplement? What's wrong with science, art, love, and politics (Alain Badiou's truth procedures)?

Science is misrepresented by Protestants in America as a competing authorizing source of dogmatic truth. Dogmatic truths derive their essence not from their objects but from a demand on subjects, which is to believe in the authoritative Idea.

This is the opposite of science, and for reasons that are methodological. The purpose of science is not to make available knowledge that will confer authority. Science is not the machinery for finding and collecting the knowledge that props up the Master or the project of mastery of Being. That project is increasingly revealing itself as the nullity of shit. Science like art is inquiry. It is inventive, it is avant-garde, and so it is creative, and world-transforming. Perhaps it is not too much of a leap to say also: revolutionary. At least provided that we admit that like so many other things, philosophers are right if they say we still don't know (enough about) what it means.

There is no master. God is not the master of Being. If you like, this is because that like all metaphysical dogmas is an idolatrous ideology, in part just because a God identified with both Being and the Good is necessarily "more than" all such notions. Though of course in recent years, the return to religion so vaunted by our conservative Christian pundits has revealed in another part of the world, has proven problematic.

That part of the world is less favored by those "Christians" than are, today, “the Jews,” who seem beautiful both as symbols of American business success underscored by their own religious obedience and piety,
and because, not inconsistently with that, identified with a piece of real estate that serves a key role both in evangelical Protestant science fiction mythology and, coincidentally, in the foreign policy of the United States which has been concerned about the troubling combination of oil reserves and political instability in that region. At the same time, the claims made for God's extreme absolute authority by many political extremists do tend to render rhetorical invocations of divine authority of doubtful utility. As it happens, Christians and Muslims do that often and Jews almost never because its daughter religions are religions of empire and therefore of faith. The Jewish affirmation of God, the Shema, is not a loyalty oath nor a declaration of war. But needless to say, it isn't overwritten by the dawning of the Age of Acquarius either. So why is it such a fad, among secular Protestants and Jews alike, to become a Buddhist and discover as if for the first time and of the true and only, "spirituality"?

It is a culture of narcissism, which is about realizing your potentiality as a beautifully flowering human being rooted, like a plant, in just the right soil needing the best nutrients. Cultivate not or not only the garden by your house; cultivate the self as a garden. Of course, as Heidegger showed, the late modern idea of realizing a potentiality for greatness that we have as mere human beings just is in the end a nihilistic pursuit of power. It is based on a logically circular proposition: You ought to realize your potential to be your most authentic self, which is simply a potential to be realized, maximized, effectuated, performed, ironized, hated and loved, but above all developed and realized. This is like the great American ethical project, which is to succeed precisely and only at success, or generic excellence, as in sports in standard ideas of what business is based on. (The object has no ethical value, because the object is to increase profit and power; but it need not have one, because ethical conduct is excellence in work or performance, the goal being just to excel in any task whatever).

This narcissism is the “spiritual” (ethical, concerned with the good life as a form of life and not just a set of obligations) form of a culture of materialistic self-interest or ‘every man for himself’: using the sometime deviant erotic practice as metaphor, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard showed in “Sauve qui peut (la vie)” (retitled in English, “Everyman for Himself”), that when all you can reasonably be expected to want to do is save your own ass, then society is revealed to be based on social relationships that are little more than buggery. When everything is fucked, what can you do but go get yourself fucked or tell all the other buggers to bugger off. This film was not received as a moralistic critique of commodified sexuality, though it is that also for sure, but a despairing epic poem of an infernal capitalism, one where, as the Buzzcocks put it, “I believe in, what I believe in. There is no love in this world anymore.”

Of course the true desire of the narcissistic subject of the modern state is not to find his own truth as the right relationship to personal relationships and the bodily pleasures that increasingly are alone what mediates and represents them. It is, rather to die, which is what the narcissist busies himself fearing and avoiding but secretly wants, because it is only in a fatal way that one can discover woven together in a lovely synthesis all the strands of one's self so as to in full authenticity "be who you are." The benevolent torturer engages you masochistically as seeker of this truth of the self, and when it is finally consummated, it is the proper time of your death. You who never was loved and never loved anyone or anything. Make no mistaken: here all is spiritual.

Stuff your spirituality. I refuse harmony. I am a punk rocker, like Brecht and Beckett. I don't want to be reconciled.

If you think you have found God, I am happy for you, especially if you don't think you need to include and exclude people like me from the divine totalization.

I'm sure it is as beautiful as a woven mantra. Maybe on the way out you will see good and feel a rush of joy. I say: Let's change the channel, this game is boring.