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Today's
Stories
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al--Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's Sizzling
New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July
20, 2004
Stan
Cox
The Bush / Kerry War Ticket
Chris
Randolph
An Open Letter to Dr. Ehrenreich: It's Over, Barb!
Forrest
Hylton
The Ghosts of Gonismo: "Popular Patricipation"
and Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Mark
Scaramella
It's Official! Mendocino County is Crazier and Fatter Than the Rest
of California
Sam
Bahour
The World is Knocking on Israel's Door
George
Reiter
A Defense of David Cobb
John
Ross
Burying Iraq, Burying Bush
John
L. Hess
Girlie Stuff: Media Tolerance of Arnold & Co.
Website
of the Day
This Land is Your Land
July
19, 2004
Uri
Avnery
Marie and the Ghosts: the Hoax of Paris
Col.
Dan Smith
What Has Been Accomplished?
Mike
Whitney
Allawi: Our Puppet with a Pistol
Karyn
Strickler
Just Marriage, Not Gay Marriage
Robert
Fisk
The Crisis of Information in Baghdad
David
Swanson
Media Blackout of US Labor Opposition to Iraq
War
Jennifer
van Bergen
The Death of the Great Writ of Liberty
July
17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay--Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti--War Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Coffin Bombs
in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP, But a Movement
in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
| Weekend
Edition
July 24 / 25, 2004
Christianity
and the Left
The Latin
American Experience
By
JUSTIN E.H. SMITH
In
my last piece in Counterpunch, I discussed the role of Christianity
in American politics, and argued that the progressives would do
best not to ridicule the right for its constant invocation of Christ,
but instead to reclaim the legacy of Christ for its own righteous
ends. I would like to follow this piece up with a consideration
of the role of Christianity in progressive politics beyond the borders
of the U.S., in a part of the world where --refreshingly, to my
mind-- political debate is not circumscribed by the junior-high-debate-club
inanity that on CNN and its equivalents passes for the fullest and
most glorious exercise of our First Amendment rights.
Ever
since Marx and Engels denounced religion as the opium of the masses,
socialism has commonly been perceived as synonymous with godlessness,
and not just by Pat Robertson and his ilk, but by the left itself.
But socialism did not begin with Marx and Engels. Its full history
extends back, at least, to the very earliest phase of modernity,
when the desire for a utopia-to-come could as yet only be articulated
in terms of the fulfillment of scripture.
For
instance, in 1534 the Anabaptist Jan Matthijs declared the city
of Münster in Westphalia to be the new Jerusalem. Money was
outlawed, the wealth of the local elite was seized and redistributed
as communal property. Matthijs was soon killed, and his brother
in arms, Jan van Leyden, rose to power in the defense of the Lord’s
new earthly kingdom, soon declaring himself “King David,”
and introducing the Old Testament practice of polygamy. The fun
didn’t last long. Soon enough, the forces of reaction took
the city back, and raised the Anabaptist radicals to the top of
the cathedral in cages, where they died of exposure. The cages are
still there, though one may wonder whom they are meant to serve
as a warning.
For
some reason, it remains necessary to point out at every occasion
that the history of socialism didn’t end with Marx and Engels
and their atheist acolytes either. In the end, it may turn out that
the chapter of socialist history that extends from 1848 to 1989
was only as atheist as the times required it to be, no more and
no less than were Darwin, Spencer, Nietzsche, Orwell, and countless
other, overly hopeful yet resolutely non-socialist despisers of
medieval benightedness.
Even
during this period, socialism was not uniformly atheist, either.
Outside of the immediate sphere of influence of the Soviets, adherents
to socialist principles continued to recognize the deeper roots
of their tradition, which extend back not just through movements
like that of the Anabaptists, but indeed all the way to the Gospels
themselves. In Latin America in particular, though the Soviet puncture
of the Monroe Doctrine in places like Cuba and Nicaragua is what
captured the attention of the American public, many saw Christianity
and socialism, sometimes even that strain of socialism that takes
Marx as one of its founding fathers, to be naturally suited to one
another.
The
Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel (born in Argentina and
residing for a number of decades in Mexico), and other theoreticians
of Liberation Theology, while decidedly rejecting the Catholic Church
as a powerful and oppressive social institution, built a movement
based on the understanding of Christ himself as a fighter against
powerful worldly institutions in the name of the oppressed. This
movement continues to thrive today.
In
the new book, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation
Theology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), Eduardo Mendieta has done
a fine job of collecting together a wide variety of Dussel’s
writings, translated into English and spanning the course of several
decades, which together may help the Anglophone reader unfamiliar
with Liberation Theology to understand how these two movements,
Christianity and socialism —so at odds with one another in
a society (American) that increasingly seems to take free-market
capitalism as itself the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy—
at least on one interpretation may be thought to be ideally suited
to one another.
In
Dussel’s view, the shared fundamental concerns of socialism
and Christianity arise from the shared conviction in each tradition
that, to paraphrase the Sermon on the Mount, the future looks bright
for the poor, while the rich are doomed. Marx says doomed and Christ
says damned, but their loyalties are in the same place. Dussel,
however, does what Marx certainly could not in offering a distinctly
Biblical interpretation of the concept of poverty. For Dussel, to
sin is just to take on the role of the “Prince of this world,”
of someone who possesses power and exercises it in the spheres of
politics and economics. The poor, in turn, are those over whom this
power is exercised. Christ, Dussel points out, in taking on human
likeness, “made himself nothing, assuming the nature of a
slave” (Philippians 2:7). With Christ on their side, the poor
are the righteous pole of a dialectical opposition that is sustained
not by the poor’s own, pure lack, but rather by the perpetual
deprivation they suffer through the appropriation of what is rightfully
theirs by the rich. Precisely because they are deprived in this
way, Dussel thinks, it is the poor who are also the most open and
spiritually available to God, and this is for him the full meaning
of the claim in the Sermon on the Mount that the Kingdom of Heaven
belongs to the poor in spirit.
Another
important dichotomy that informs Dussel’s work is that between
the global periphery and the global center. The former of these
Dussel sees as being constituted in different respects by Asians,
Africans, and Latin Americans, and by women and children. It would
be a mistake to detect here an incoherence arising from the marriage
of postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism with Christianity. Of course,
it is true that Christianity came to the New World by force, and
for this reason it is customary for anti-imperialists, particularly
those less resistant to the plague of vapid new-agery, to see Christianity
as part of the legacy of oppression and so to elect instead to ‘celebrate’
supposedly more deeply rooted, native belief systems. But Dussel
seeks to inscribe himself into a long tradition within Catholicism
that faces up to the generally oppressive character of the Church
without for that thinking that fighting oppression requires rejection
of the Church tout court. For he distinguishes between Christianity
and Christendom. The former is the ethical core of the Church, concerned
first and foremost with the corporeal suffering of its subjects,
while the latter is, in Mendieta’s words, “a moralistic
perspective, concerned with dogmas, laws, ontologies of war and
order, epistemologies of certitude and univocity.”
For
Dussel, it is important that the evangelizing activity associated
with colonial expansion in the modern period occurred concomitantly
with the ultimate rise of what he sees as an idolatrous secularism
in the center the exaltation of the self as an object of worship
characteristic of western modernity. “To be able to say with
Nietzsche ‘God is dead,’ he writes, it was necessary
first of all to kill his manifestation of himself to the Indian,
the African, the Asian” (26). Missionary imperialism, then,
did not bring God to the people inhabiting the periphery; it took
God away.
Ever
since then, the Church has been two different things in the center
and in the periphery. The death of the ‘divine’ in Europe,
though, simultaneously opened up the new possibility for the true
Church, rooted in faith in God as mediated by the poor, to grow
up in precisely those parts of the world upon which early modern
Europe had earlier imposed its will under the false pretense of
saving souls. In short, souls were not saved in the mass conversions
of Europe’s early modern colonial expansion, but the Church
may be saved if its essential nature, as a “liberating community”
that “identif[ies] itself with the oppressed so as to ‘break
down the barriers’ of the system that have been closed by
the work of sin” (29) is able to come through in the peripheral
countries of the world in which Christianity was once a soul-killing
burden imposed from the outside by a civilization whose own soul
was itself already moribund.
Dussel,
then, is very critical of reformist theologians of the center, such
as Niebuhr and Barth, who no longer concern themselves with the
possibility of radically changing the system, and see the plight
of the Christian as cultivating individual goodness while accepting
the inescapable flaws and injustices of one’s social world.
For Dussel, imagining every Christian theologian in the predicament
of Moses, reformist theology seeks to answer the question, How can
we survive in Egypt? while liberation, in contrast, is to get out
of Egypt. In other words, as Dussel writes, “the ethics of
liberation… starts by describing the system within which the
subject always starts… Today in Latin America, without making
invalid connections, we can say that ‘the system’ is
Anglo-Saxon capitalism in society, machismo in sexual attitudes,
ideological domination in education: idolatry on every level”
(138f.).
Dussel’s
predecessor and inspiration in the defense of the Catholic Church
against its modern descent into idolatry is the 16th-century Spanish
priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, a great defender of the integrity
of the life and cultures of the New World, whose most notable written
work is the Brevísima relación de la destruición
de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies)
of 1552. There is nothing heretical about Las Casas’ views.
He believed that the Gospel had to be brought to the Native Americans,
but did not believe that the gold-hungry conquistadors were in any
position to spread it. As Las Casas writes in the Brevísima
relación:
The
common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves
Christian and who have gone there [to the New World] to extirpate
those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth is unjustly
waging cruel and bloody wars… Their reason for killing and
destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians
have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves
with riches in a very brief time and thus to rise to a high estate
disproportionate to their merits (cited in Dussel, 64).
Liberation
theology in the periphery, then, goes back almost as far as the
utopian Christian social movements in Europe, such as Anabaptism.
The difference, for Dussel, is that those in the periphery literally
occupy a different theological position, and thus a different theology
is needed to respond to their spiritual plight. As the global poor,
those in the periphery are alone capable of playing a mediating
role for God on earth.
Dussel’s
account of the history of modern western philosophy as a product
of the civilization that was simultaneously plundering the globe
is insightful, yet in places heavy-handed. Mendieta has suggested
to me that, for Dussel, the sovereign subject who appears as the
protagonist of the Meditations represents the assimilation into
an epistemological stance of an attitude that is in its origins
imperial. Now, a lot of different meanings may be packed into the
“I think,” that serves as the cornerstone of Cartesian
epistemology; it doesn’t seem to me, anyway, that “I
conquer” is one of them. Of course, in general it is a sound
approach to the history of thought to consider its deeper roots
in the social and economic circumstances of its era. Engels’
take on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, for example, that
it is the theological counterpart to the emerging capitalist system,
in which success or failure in fact have nothing to do with how
hard you work, but with the vicissitudes of the omnipotent market,
says a lot about capitalism and Calvinism (and Engels), and may
actually be picking out a true connection between base and superstructure.
But I fail to see how the sovereignty of the thinking subject can
be cast as a transposition into the epistemological realm of the
conquering subject represented near-simultaneously by Pizarro and
Cortes.
Descartes,
for all his shortcomings, was for the most part interested in sitting
in his armchair by his fireplace and, well, true to his nature as
a res cogitans, just sort of thinking about things. This may be
a foreshadowing of the shameful idleness that comes with the high
standard of living the developed world continues to enjoy as a result
of its perpetual plundering of the rest of the world, but it is
not itself an act of plundering.
If
anything, Descartes’ greatest failure is not that he would
justify the oppression of others, but that his philosophy has nothing
at all to say about others. In this connection, Dussel is justly
dissatisfied with the Cartesian tradition for its failure to take
on what some have impotently called ‘the other-minds problem’.
Descartes worries early on in his Meditations on First Philosophy
that all those people he sees through his window may just be so
many automata in coats and hats. He then goes on to establish his
own existence by appeal to the cogito, God’s existence through
a few more clever arguments, and the existence of the external world
through the revelation that God is no deceiver and so would not
make us wrongly believe we exist in a world that does not depend
on us. All those automata he worried about earlier, it would appear,
are just so many things in the external world, like the clouds and
the rivers. Descartes does not need others to exist in the same
way that he himself does in order for him to accomplish his primary
philosophical goals.
There
is another philosophical tradition from which Dussel draws inspiration,
of which Emmanuel Levinas is a prominent representative, according
to which the existence of others is the very starting point of philosophy.
Or, to put it in Levinasian terms, ethics is first philosophy. This
starting point is deeply rooted in the tradition of Judeo-Christian
religious thought, a tradition in which Dussel, of course, is happy
to inscribe himself. Christian love, as Simone Weil put it, is nothing
but the true apprehension of the other’s full being.
On
Dussel’s understanding, this ethics-as-first-philosophy is
best pursued by a method he calls ‘analectics’, which
is for him the practice of ‘listening to the transontological
voice of the other’. And it is the poor, in the theological
sense sketched above, who, being locked out of the system, are perpetually
other. As Dussel explains:
The
‘other’ (‘the widow, the orphan, the foreigner,’
in the prophets’ formulation, or under the universal name
of ‘the poor person’) confronting the system is the
metaphysical reality beyond the ontological being of the system.
As a result he or she is ‘exteriority’, what is most
alien to the system as a totality… Jesus’ identification
with the poor (Matt. 25) is not a metaphor; it is a logic (139).
If
Marx’s dialectics promises the inevitable war of the poor
against the sinners who dominate them, which would also inevitably
lead to the production of a new totality, Dussel’s analectics
seeks to elevate the poor to their rightful, central place, the
place that Christ designated for them as the mediators of God on
earth, without in so doing creating from the poor a new totality.
Orwell’s pigs, in other words, will not start walking on their
hind legs. Of course, many would-be members of the flock have found
the tremendous delay the meek and humble have to put up with before
they get their reward —that is, the rest of their natural
lives— downright prohibitive, and have instead sought power
and magnanimity in this life. They have either learned to bear,
or have never heard, Christ’s portentous dismissal: Verily,
they have their reward (Matt. 6:2).
One
may face, in this connection, no small difficulty understanding
what sort of social order Dussel realistically expects to attain.
The great Brazilian leftist leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
has recently been very frank about the difficulties any elected
leader faces in representing the will of the poor masses. If too
much opposition to the standard list of status quo injustices is
detected, foreign investors will inevitably pull out and economies
will surely collapse, at which point not even incremental progress,
let alone substantial change, will be possible. But here again it
is important to emphasize that Dussel does not seek to replace one
totality with another.
While
Fidel and Lula may represent impressive instances of the people’s
will making itself felt, on my understanding of Dussel’s view,
the hope for liberation does not rest with earthly princes. Analectics,
in contrast with dialectics, is concerned with compassionate solidarity
among the poor in the face of domination. In the experience of this
solidarity, even if the domination is not thereby diminished, its
totalizing power is. Here, of course, one may wonder if Dussel is
not being accommodationist, as he elsewhere accuses Niebuhr and
Barth of being; that is, whether he is casting theology as a way
for communities of believers to become a genuine alternative, but
never a real threat, to the existing social order.
It
might be suggested in response to this concern that Dussel distinguishes
himself from Niebuhr and Barth in the same way that Las Casas’s
rejection of the Catholic Church that created him was distinct from
the contrarian gestures of groups like the radical Anabaptists.
In the global center, there is a range of positions that one can
take up on the spectrum from sheer apologism for the existing social
order on the one end to radical rejection of this order on the other.
The latter position all too often ends, though, in what looks like
a farcical recrudescence of precisely what the contrarians would
have hoped to do away with, which is why even the most committed
socialist must face up to the lesson of Animal Farm and proceed
with some caution and a healthy dose of skepticism about just how
radiant the future, as a result of our actions, can really ever
be. Las Casas, for his part, was not staging a grand bit of street
theater motivated by ecstatic visions of some better world. He was
broken down and sickened by the brutality of the Catholic conquistadors
against the Native Americans.
Outside
of Europe and North America, Dussel might affirm, there is no such
spectrum of accommodationism and contrarianism as the one on which
we may justly place Barth and Niebuhr. Being since the 16th century
nothing more than a source of raw material and labor for the countries
of the center, and being by definition less powerful in an economic
and military sense, the countries of the periphery cannot even pretend
to play around with overturning the global social order. Through
compassionate solidarity and the other virtues of analectics, though,
they can create an alternative moral pole in the world— an
alternative moral center, if you will. And that, Christianity tells
us, is a force that’s always stronger than all the money and
weapons concentrated in whatever plot of land enjoys the mixed blessing
of being, for its time, at the global center of things.
Justin
E. H. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal,
Canada.
He can
be reached at: justismi@alcor.concordia.ca
Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
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