The Secular Religion of the Left
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
For most of human history, men and women have
derived their moral dimension of life from the
family and religion. Both of those are now dead or
dying in the West under the influence of its new
moral and ethical system. That system is one that we
know in its various forms as the left.
The
left can be summed up as moral materialism. It is a
secular religion that claims to add a moral
dimension to materialism. Its obsessions are largely
economic, from its early class warfare focus to its
modern environmentalism. Even its racial politics
code class warfare by skin color.
Kill off religion and what do you have left? The
answer can be seen in China. You're left with
materialism and family interests.. Cast off the
shackles of the family for individualistic
consumerism and you're left with nothing except
materialism as can be seen in any major Western
city.
Modern urban man is much too "smart" for religion.
At least his own. He wants to add an ethical
dimension to life without having to believe in
anything except the sense of fairness that he
already has, but which he does not realize is not
nearly as valid objectively as it is subjectively in
his inner emotional reality.
And that is what the left is. It strips away
everything except that egotistical sense that things
should be run more fairly with predictably unfair
results.
Liberalism, and the milder flavors of the left,
provide a permission slip for materialism by
elevating it through political activism. This is the
philosophical purpose of environmentalism's green
label. It tells you that you are a good person for
buying something and soothes the moral anxieties of
an urban class with no coherent moral system except
the need to impose an ethical order on the
consumerism that defined their childhood, their
adolescence and their adult life.
Those most in need of the moral system of
materialism are the descendants of the displaced,
whether by immigration to the United States or
migration within the United States from rural to
urban areas, who have become detached from a large
extended family structure that once sustained them.
Their grandparents had already loosened their grip
on religion and as the family disintegrated,
materialism took its place. Their grandparents
worked hard to provide for their children, but the
children no longer saw maintaining the family as a
moral activity. Sometimes they didn't even bother
with a family. They became lonely individuals
looking for a collective. A virtual political
family.
Liberalism fills the missing space once inhabited by
religion and the family. It provides a moral and
ethical system as religion did and the accompanying
sense of purpose and its state institutions replace
and supplant the family. It does both of these
things destructively and badly as its institutions
forever try to patch social problems created by the
disintegration of the family and its ideas provide
too few people with a sense of purpose of a
meaningful life.
And yet it isn't entirely to blame for this state of
affairs. The left has actively tried to destroy the
family and religion, but the American liberal was
until recently less guilty on both charges. His main
crime was collaborating with the left while refusing
to acknowledge its destructive aims. The process by
which the displacement of liberal ideas and their
replacement by the ideas of the far left is nearly
complete. The American liberal is now an aging
relic. In his place is the resentful radical.
The process that led to this state of affairs isn't
the left's fault either. Even if it's not for lack
of trying. In some ways the left isn't the problem,
it's a symptom of the problem. Its ability to
fundamentally transform people is limited. The
transformation that has occurred is because of the
choices that people have been led into making
trading religion and family for a dead end
materialism. Those choices evolved organically from
the natural direction of society and technology.
And into that empty space, the left came. It
dominates because there is nothing else to fill that
space. It can only be truly resisted by cultural
groups that have maintained hold of family and
religion. Without that sense of purpose, there is
only the endless baffled retreat of the Republican
Party.
Liberalism appeals more to the middle class and
the upper class because it is a religion of
materialism. It makes very little sense to those who
don't have material things. The underclass might
embrace the harsher populism of the left, but shows
little interest in its larger collectivist
philosophy. The underclass is losing family and
religion at a faster rate than the upper class, but
it clings to what it has and finds meaning in it. It
may be nakedly materialistic, but it doesn't believe
that it is too smart for religion or too
individualistic for family. It has many flaws, but
arrogance isn't one of them.
Ennobling consumerism is a difficult task. The left
doesn't come anywhere close to succeeding at it.
Instead it makes it more expensive and raises the
entry barriers for everything by working to
eliminate cheap food, cheap household goods and
cheap everything. It's a class issue.
Why does the left really hate Walmart? It doesn't
really have a lot to do with unions and has a lot to
do with class. Walmart's crime is industrial. It's
the crime of the factory and the supermarket and
every means of mass production and consumption. It
makes cheap products too readily available to the
masses. Liberals like to believe that they oppose
consumerism, but what they really want to do is
raise the entry levels to the lifestyle. Liberal
consumerism is all about upselling ethics.
When tangible goods become too easy to produce, you
add value through intangibles. The fair trade food
tastes the same as non-fair trade food. Organic, a
category with a debatable meaning, doesn't really
provide that much more value. And environmental
labels are worth very little. And yet the average
product at Whole Foods is covered in so many
"ethical liberal" labels that it's hard to figure
out what it even is.
Intangible value is all about class. And class is
all about creating barriers to entry.
Liberalism has become a revolt against the middle
class that its grandparents struggled to reach, a
rejection of their "materialism" while substituting
the "ethical materialism" of liberalism in its place
that envisions a much smaller upper and middle class
that derives its wealth and power not from hard work
in the private sector, but highly profitable social
justice volunteerism in the public sector.
An American Dream of universal prosperity has been
pitted against the left's dream of a benevolent
feudal system in which the few will be very well
paid to oversee the income equality of the many.
The left's private argument against the American
Dream is that it's little more than Walmart. And to
some degree they're right. Easy availability of the
necessities of life does not lead to a meaningful
life. But the easy contempt that the left has for it
shows its basic inability to understand how
important these things are and how hard they were to
come by for most of human history.
Salt was once a precious commodity. Today it sells
for pennies a pound. The ability to light the
darkness meant the difference between studying at
night and living in ignorance. Today a light bulb
goes for a quarter. At least it did until the left
banned them. And electricity, the left also keeps
raising the price of that. Few of the
post-apocalyptic fantasies spilling out of Hollywood
really describe what would happen if the people
manufacturing them were thrown back before the
industrial revolution..
Progress has made a good life materially possible,
but it has also displaced and damaged the social
mechanisms that make a good life socially possible.
We have easy access to technology and streets full
of vicious illiterate thugs. We can discuss anything
with anyone, but we live in a society that values
few things worth discussing. We have mass
production, but not mass character.
For all its feigned populism, such elitist critiques
of society are not foreign to the left. The left's
elitist critiques differ in some regards, but they
are on the same basic wavelength as those of the
social conservative. And its solution is to promote
what it considers social progress by reversing or
slowing down industrial, commercial and
technological progress. The environmental movement
is only the latest ideological incarnation of this
philosophy which strives to slow down the rate of
progress.
The
left's social collectivism however is no replacement
for what is being lost. What it really does is
attempt to apply industrial and commercial
strategies to human relationships. Not only is it
not a challenge to a consumeristic society, but it
attempts to worsen the damage by rebuilding society
on the model of the factory and the department store
as an impersonal system.
That's not a solution to the problem. It is the
problem.
The left cannot escape its own materialism. Its
attempts at adding an ethical dimension to
materialism fail because its ethical dimension is
still materialistic. Its pathetic efforts at
injecting pastiches of Third World and minority
spirituality into its politics to provide the
illusion of a spiritual dimension are hollow and
racist. The left cannot fill its own hole, because
it is the hole.
Like Islam, it provides something for people to
believe in, but the thing it provides is the
compulsion to find meaning by forcibly remaking
other people's lives in a perpetual revolution which
becomes its own purpose.
The left can't replace family or religion. Its
social solutions are alien and artificial. They fix
nothing and damage everything. Their appeal is to
those who are arrogant and starved for meaning, who
want religion without religion and family without
family only to discover that they are not enough.