RE: Capitalism - the Ultimate Religion
October 4, 2010 at 2:48 pm
(This post was last modified: October 4, 2010 at 3:20 pm by Existentialist.)
Thanks for your post TheDarkestofAngels, I will read it and reply as soon as I can - I'll just throw this one into the pot first, which I've been preparing this evening, all replies welcome.
To continue the theme I started in Post 54 of this thread, it is not just Walter Benjamin who appears to accept the ineluctable nature of capitalism - the same universal, indisputable, authoritarian and all-pervasive nature that one might associate with the medieval Roman Catholic Church. No less as figure than Max Weber is also cited, describing capitalism's unavoidable powers, in the same publication I discovered the other day, (p67) by Michael Löwy:-
"First of all because, as we have seen, capitalism, by defining itself as the natural and necessary form of the modern economy, does not admit any different future, any way out, any alternative. Its force is, writes Weber, ‘irresistible’, and it presents itself as an inevitable fate".
Löwy goes on,
"The system reduces the vast majority of humanity to ‘damned of the earth’ who cannot hope for divine salvation, since their economic failure is the sign that they are excluded from God’s grace."
These kinds of passages are music to my ears. While I might muse that if Weber and Benjamin were alive today, the impact they could make on the nature of the debate about what atheism can contribute to the development of humanity would play havoc with the narrow boundaries of atheism as defined by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and their like, I realise this thinking on my part arises from celebrity culture. The truth is that there are many thousands of Max Webers and Walter Benjamins who could easily shift the debate generated by modern atheism in away from the islamophobic, anti-faith backwater in which it currently languishes, and instead reinvigorate more comprehensive discussions about the religious and theistic principles that govern the whole of our modern society. However at the moment there are also many people who have more confidence acting individually and together to block wider debate by concentrating collective intellectual efforts on less important and even trivial subjects. There is no particular reason why it should remain like this, and I suspect that as resistance to the current right-wing onslaught on ordinary people grows, the freedoms assumed by previously unheard atheists will flourish, and the debates will shift to more liberating ground than we are currently witnessing.[/align],
To continue the theme I started in Post 54 of this thread, it is not just Walter Benjamin who appears to accept the ineluctable nature of capitalism - the same universal, indisputable, authoritarian and all-pervasive nature that one might associate with the medieval Roman Catholic Church. No less as figure than Max Weber is also cited, describing capitalism's unavoidable powers, in the same publication I discovered the other day, (p67) by Michael Löwy:-
"First of all because, as we have seen, capitalism, by defining itself as the natural and necessary form of the modern economy, does not admit any different future, any way out, any alternative. Its force is, writes Weber, ‘irresistible’, and it presents itself as an inevitable fate".
Löwy goes on,
"The system reduces the vast majority of humanity to ‘damned of the earth’ who cannot hope for divine salvation, since their economic failure is the sign that they are excluded from God’s grace."
These kinds of passages are music to my ears. While I might muse that if Weber and Benjamin were alive today, the impact they could make on the nature of the debate about what atheism can contribute to the development of humanity would play havoc with the narrow boundaries of atheism as defined by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and their like, I realise this thinking on my part arises from celebrity culture. The truth is that there are many thousands of Max Webers and Walter Benjamins who could easily shift the debate generated by modern atheism in away from the islamophobic, anti-faith backwater in which it currently languishes, and instead reinvigorate more comprehensive discussions about the religious and theistic principles that govern the whole of our modern society. However at the moment there are also many people who have more confidence acting individually and together to block wider debate by concentrating collective intellectual efforts on less important and even trivial subjects. There is no particular reason why it should remain like this, and I suspect that as resistance to the current right-wing onslaught on ordinary people grows, the freedoms assumed by previously unheard atheists will flourish, and the debates will shift to more liberating ground than we are currently witnessing.[/align],
