Against spiritualism and romanticism: politics as immanent critique

Critiques of the West are Western, and this is true of the spiritualist discourses of followers of Bergson and Heidegger along with every form of romanticism and every appropriation of "Eastern spiritual wisdom" (Buddhism, Taoism, etc.) in order to serve as fulcrum of a critique of the dominant sensibility of "The West," however that is understood. The whole idea that Western society and culture are alienating -- not oppressive and exploitative but making other, making strange, being secular and unholy, being oriented to Roman "power" and not Christian "love," being an oppressive rule of fathers (instead of what alternative? How does feminist identity politics promise different social forms, rather than just inclusion and the "critique of power'?), etc. Protests against science, against technology, against bureaucracy, even against capitalism---these all fail when they resort to idealist spiritualism as their basis. Either the culture of the West is still not as free and equal as its own ideologies and many social and cultural movements have sought to make it more so, drawing on resources that are absolutely integral, immanent, to what is being criticized, or our culture is wrong and we should want to exchange it for some other (how is that possible?) -- which is not more free, or more equal, not more democratic, and not surely socialist either, just less "alienating"--and in that case you can appeal to non-Western and "primitive" cultures (with the implicit aid of "Western" anthropology) or to some form of religion or spirituality. Those are the options. The spiritual option is not anti-capitalist because its critique of modernity is transcendent, not immanent, and it is idealist, not materialist. It is historically non-immanent, meaning that the options are presumed (blindly and wrongly, to be sure) to not come from within but needing to be imported from without, like some new world that supposedly is being discovered and whose resources can be made use of. Or else the outside is other than Being as such, other than not this or that worldly reality or possibility, but any—and then again you are in the space of religion. The choice in the alternatives idealism/materialism and transcendent/immanent is religion or politics. Or even: ethics or politics, because these are rightly separated in the modern world. The political is always a gesture towards an immanent outside.