Dana Milbank finds the fortitude to struggle through Rick Perry's 2008 book, On My Honor: A Personal Compendium of Contemporary Ignorance and Religious Bigotry. (OK, I invented the subtitle -- superfluously.) Notes Milbank:
Among the things Perry "deems" harmful: universities (students "have been taught that corporations are evil, religion is the opiate of the masses, and morality is relative"....
It is self-evident that some corporations are, and morality is, but I'd like to specially pause for Perry's conventional distortion of Karl Marx's observation -- "religion is the opiate of the masses" -- which habitually is loosely quoted, as well as quoted out of context. Here's the German philosopher's more complete, original version:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.
If one reads Marx widely, or merely skims his writings, the realization that he was a far better sociologist than economist rapidly sinks in. His insights into 19th-century Europe's social tumult are often stunning in their originality and brilliant in composition -- especially when juxtaposed with the sonorously dry economics of Das Kapital, which even Fidel Castro once confessed he was unable to finish. The above passage, though, beautifully mixes both disciplines. And in it, Marx is clearly sympathetic to religion as both an "expression" and "protest" of "real [economic] distress." His was no high-handed denunciation of the masses' ignorance; it was a recognition of real, material human needs, which were ignored by government authorities and complicitly sanctioned by finely robed sorcerers.
Implicit -- to me -- in Marx's observation is that with socioeconomic justice could come a sensible return of, should we continue the metaphor, opium usage. His marvelous construct -- "The demand to give up the illusion about [the people's] condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions" -- can be read in a way in which "illusion" refers only to the illusory here and now; which is to say that Marx, in this passage, anyway, does not deny at least the possibility of the metaphysical there and later. He's merely saying that in conditions of vast socioeconomic inequality, the most fundamental precept of most organized religions (an afterlife) is a cruel co-conspirator of secular oppression.
Whatever. All I do know about a possible afterlife is this: If I ever slip into one and hear a "debate" between Karl Marx and Rick Perry, I'll know I'm in heaven.
Hey PM, what do you think of this?
Obama has requested a Joint Session of Congress on 9/7 to lay out his plans. It is the same day AND time as the NBC-Politico-Reagan Library GOP presidential debate.
Sign that he's going big, yes - no? thought the news might ease your frustration.
Posted by: Alli | August 31, 2011 at 11:50 AM
I always find it amusing that those who oppose Marx and socialism and all those other evil things in order to defend their cherished view of that wonderful invention named capitalism have never bothered to read the dude. Capital is truly an outstanding book and something of a literary as well an economic masterpiece. Marx was a helluva of a writer, and extremely witty in an insightful way. But to those who like their capitalism pure without that state intervention business, I recommend that they read the section of Capital entitled "On the So-Called Primitive Origins." Not even marxists read this section because as Marx lays it out in his narrative, industrial capitalism has its origins in the state and the grandees working hand in hand to screw over the little guy and take away his stuff. It truly is a breathtaking narrative, both in terms of its violent content and the way its told in an epic kind of way. Worthy even of the glory days of Cecil B. de Mille and D. W. Griffith. This is why in Marx's view poor people rising up and taking names and kicking butt and reclaiming the fruits of their labor was only righting the scales of universal justice, albeit in a dramatic manner.
Posted by: christo | August 31, 2011 at 01:51 PM