Why I Gave Up On The Secular Left In Favor Of The Religious Left

Listening to that Youtube of Michael Brooks, a call-in Maoist, Jamie Peck, et all discussing Maoism and a "Marxism for the 21st century" put me in a really bad mood.  And then there was my brawl that started with me pointing out that anyone who seriously talked about Maoism as anything except a horrific oppressive example of the most murderous government in human history - which didn't morph into Marx's stateless worker's paradise but into one-party, dictatorial Victorian capitalism on steroids cum Orwellian surveillance state is as bad as any neo-Nazi Holocaust denier.  If you want to see how bad it is in that corner of play-lefty land, you could look up the total dweeb fat-faced pasty-white- Canadian in a quasi-Lenin-cap- sometimes-multi-colored spikey haired -Maoist-Kim apologist Jason Unruhe.  One of the play-lefties I brawled with threw one of his stupider Youtubes at me.   If that ass has ever done a day of physical labor in his life - well, no, I wouldn't eat his hat.  I might dope slap him with it.

Oh, he put up a Youtube about the Youtube linked above, he didn't like it, apparently.  I didn't bother listening to it or reading what his teensy little cult of play-lefties had to say about it.  I've seen his type a thousand and twenty-seven times before, they never go anywhere.

A while back I came across a Youtube of Michael Albert the co-founder of South End Press and one of the founders of Z Magazine and Noam Chomsky which I listened to while doing chores, getting more and more annoyed as I listened to it, not because it was totally wrong but because it was so extremely uneven in quality.   I was going to type out a large section of it but decided it wasn't worth the time it would take, then I found a transcript.  Here, the beginning of their discussion of "religion" will give you a sense of what I found so annoying.

Michael Albert: Alright, what about religion? What do you think religion is?

Noam Chomsky: Well, for one thing it's virtually… Depending what you mean by religion, I mean, if you mean the Abrahamic religions?

MA: We're on weak ground here, because of course I'm religiously illiterate, but…

NC: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

MA: No, I mean, I guess… Yeah, and the other such religion of that type, what are those?

NC:Buddhism is different, spiritual beliefs among Native Americans was different, there's all kind of religions.

MA: But the distinction we're talking about there…

NC: We're talking about the Abrahamic religions?

MA: No, Catholicism…

NC: OK, that's…

MA: Protestantism, Hindu I guess…

NC: No, the Hindus are different. That's, I mean, quite different. Buddhism is quite different. I mean, if you really look at these systems of belief, they differ a lot. In fact, if you…

MA: No, but what I'm asking is what is religion per se, not…

NC: Some belief that there is something in the world which is beyond my grasp which is determining the way things happen and it's going to, you know, it will be a consolation for me, maybe, you know, if my child is dying I'll see him again in Heaven somewhere, I mean, these kinds of beliefs? And that there's sort of a spiritual force somewhere beyond my grasp, and that explains why things are happening? That's fairly ubiquitous. And it's perfectly understandable. I mean, you know, weird things are happening. Like, the sun is moving around the earth, you can see it. I mean, it doesn't happen to be happening but you see it. Well, something must be making it happen. OK, so it's Apollo on his chariot that's pulling the sun. And the same with everything else that goes on, you don't understand anything that's happening in the world. Why is my child, this sweet little wonderful kid, dying? He didn't do anything. So there's got to be some explanation somewhere.

MA: So it's a set of stories to make sense of reality, except not science…

NC:I mean, Apollo pulling the sun with a chariot, is early science. I mean, it's kind of a scientific theory, it's worked out, not trivial, like, for example the classical Greeks did discover a lot of things.

You might want to go read the rest of the transcript, which, it being Noam Chomsky has some valuable information in it though even he say some embarrassingly naive and inaccurate things about religion, some of what he says that is accurate is aggravatingly incomplete - though that's the nature of talking about "religion" as if it's a generalized topic. 

But Michael Albert's participation in it is even worse, about the only accurate thing he says in the course of it is "I'm religiously illiterate."   It makes you wonder on what other topic on which it would be deemed acceptable for someone who is as illiterate as he is on religion to be conducting such an interview.  My guess is none.   And don't for a second think I totally dismiss Michael Albert, he's a far, far more seriously realistic student of what's wrong with the left than most of the people you're likely to encounter (you should discount the title attached by whoever posted this, it is exactly what it isn't about).

I wonder, since he uses the framing of ignorance of anti-egalitarian, elitist, corporate-commercial sports to critique the same elite left such as I slammed this morning he doesn't take the one thing in such culture which has far more promise for the left, Christianity, as worth knowing more about than he does.  I think that ignorance is far more damaging for the left than not knowing about football.  I think his idea that lefties going into sports bars to talk politics as a means of making a dent in the problem is, to put it plainly, totally unrealistic and not a little condescending.  To start with you'll probably find most of them are old, white men with leisure time to waste in sports bars.  You'd be better off talking to their wives and daughters who are more likely to be at church.

I have been reading the great Swiss theologian, Hans Küng's book Does God Exist and from the first page on his great care to know what he's talking about on a huge range of issues is a complete contrast to this discussion.  I have read interviews with him and he's certainly a match if not more for Chomsky in terms of erudition.  I read Elizabeth A Johnson's book Quest For The Living God and she is far, far more in touch with poor and working people than anyone you're likely to read at Alternet or RawStory.  I've posted Youtubes by Walter Brueggemann talking about the Old Testament and his typical lecture or sermon is more radical or egalitarian than what you're ever going to hear on Majority Report or even most of what I've read in Z Magazine (though I haven't subscribed for a number of years, now).  And that doesn't even begin to mention Black theologians,  Mujerista and Liberation theologians not to mention many other theologians who are some of the most informed, some of the most connected to reality and radical writers there are now.   
I wish that all of those years I was reading the secular left, even much of the best of it, like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, I'd been reading theologians because they are far more likely to point out the right direction for the left. The books that Brueggemann was writing in the 1970s can be read now and they stand up far better than the lefties I was reading as they came out back then.   I think the main reason that lefties are generally as ignorant as Albert almost proudly claims he is of religion is as much to do with academic snobbery and elitism and a general hostility to Christianity.  And I do think it has a lot more to do with the failure of the left than anything to do with secular pop-culture.   I've given up on the secular left.  They've gone nowhere, they will go nowhere.  If they were they'd have gotten someplace except backward.