In today’s earlier post about Marx I mentioned the sense I generally have of his writing, that he describes matters with a lot of accuracy and insight but draws generally terrible (usually unduly militant) conclusions from his own brilliant descriptions. I think he expects too much from history. Let me explain how this applies to religion.
Here’s the terribly misquoted ‘opium of the people’ section from the introduction of A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”
There are also frequent criticisms of religion as an analogy to alienation under capital throughout Marx’s economic writings, many of them seemingly very influenced by that post-Protestant horror of mediation that became so integral to the individualism of liquid modernity, but I think that this famous quotation is sufficient to illustrate my point.
And what I mean is that if only Marx weren’t so completely enamored with erecting an impossible utopia on earth he might have stopped and realized, as I hope we can all stop and realize, what a beautiful thing it is that he’s described. A halo for the vale of tears! A heart for the grinding heartlessness of human existence! What an unlooked-for mercy, what a providence, what a beneficence is this! And what a cruelty, to pluck the flowers from the chain.
Marx expects too much. The great critic, paradoxically, is also too great an idealist to see the goodness that abides in the world, in its imperfections and its superstitions and its foolish noble lies. I almost want to smack him and say ‘Be satisfied with something!’