Typically this type of essay would be sent to the paying subscribers of this email newsletter. Considering the personal importance of this topic as well as it being the end of the year everyone is getting this today. If you are interested, please feel free to subscribe below.
The question of faith and if it is reconcilable with reason or if they are in opposition to each other has been at the core of my inner debate for the past three years. There is a very immediate reason for sharing these thoughts with you, not only because they pertain to my PhD work and thus ever present but more pressingly, because the discussion needs to be had if we want to move past our own predatory, self-destructive wants and needs and make that jump into the future. In here I am going to give you some context, the historical debates, some nods to further reading and why I believe we need to be having this discussion.
My first act of rebellion, the very simple act of contrarian thinking and acting was against my staunch Roman-Catholic upbringing that stems from my mother at age 11. Up until that point I believed, I had Faith in the sense of our Christian construct. Faith, as I understood it then wasn’t a warm, shining light in the center of my being but rather a physical manifest, rituals, responsibilities, actions that were soon to become the source of my anger and thus rebellion. There is no need to explain why I felt the need to challenge an important part of my structural reality but to be sure, it set me on a path of ever increasing radical atheism. It is from this base onwards that I developed a passionate curiosity to study power structures throughout history and saw the world, our development of our species, culturally, through the lens of my atheism, the complete rejection of the abuse of power, and power in itself that naturally led to my fascination in anarchism as a philosophy and guiding light towards a better life.
Fast forward some 30 plus years and I have received a scholarship to develop a post-capitalistic, utopian philosophy in the form of this PhD. Initially, I perceived and worked on this question from a very scientific, reason-based philosophical setting, however, as time progressed, my personal focus and perception has changed. To better illustrate this process, think of an onion. The onion being the question and I feel that it is my “job” to peel back every layer to get to a definable truth from which we can then build a moral framework to explore. Anything else increasingly feels fraudulent in its outset, existing only to receive the degree and not to get to the truth of the matter. The closer I was getting to the core of the issue, the more the focus was moved from the larger ideas and moved towards very painful introspection of myself - laying bare my lack of faith in humans to overcome greed, which, I consider the absolute initial stepping stone to progression past our current reality. This inability to reconcile reason and faith nearly made me quit my PhD, took me down a brutally dark rabbit hole that my amazingly brilliant Professor solved for me 6 months down the line with a pop-cultural reference. He related to Indiana Jones, knowing full-well that it is my favourite story, specifically to the scene in The Last Crusade where Dr. Jones Sr. lies dying and Jr. stands before the chasm having to take the imaginary leap of faith to get to the Holy Grail - you know the scene. Ultimately, reconciling reason and faith as a necessity to carry on requires movement and a change of perception. Again, my Professor not only knows me better than anyone but is also genuinely brilliant. My personal journey from that point onwards has been hugely interesting. Not only in the sheer sense of being able to progress with my work but it kicked off all a re-evaluation of my identity, ignited a serious academic obsession in regards to this question but most positively allows me to tap into a seemingly never ending well of energy when it comes to tackling the problems we all face daily.
Make no mistake, I am still an Atheist, I reject all forms of power-structures as a means towards peaceful progression, do not believe in an after life nor in a omnipresent deity that decides my life, but we need to talk about Faith and Reason.
What are Faith and Reason?
Faith is the belief in the truth of something that does not require any evidence and may not be provable by any empirical or rational means. Reason is the faculty of the mind through which we can logically come to rational conclusions. Traditionally, faith and reason have each been considered to be sources of justification for religious belief from which most of our collective structures in regards to society come from. I will get to the economical aspect as it pertains to us today later. Because both can purportedly serve this same epistemic function, it has been a matter of much interest to philosophers and theologians how the two are related and thus how the rational agent should treat claims derived from either source. Some have held that there can be no conflict between the two—that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will never produce contradictory or competing claims—whereas others have maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over certain propositions or methodologies. Fact is, this discussion is as old as any story that we know in regards to our philosophical human history, going back to Ancient Greece - only because we don’t have the historical records to go back even further. Importantly, this discourse isn’t limited to pre-Christian thought but also incredibly present in Judaism and Islam ( as I am sure other religions, of which I know too little of to feel comfortable mentioning them ), it truly is a question of humanity throughout time. If anyone is interested in a brief historical summary I can happily forward a few links to help you along that journey.
With that we get to our present time and the issues at play. On the one hand there is the linguistic nuance in the word Faith that we here in the global north west have been conditioned to over the last 500 years - and that, broadly speaking, equates the word with Christianity as we know it today. Again, broadly speaking. Secondly, we have the complete rejection of Faith by our intellectual forefathers, specifically Marx. Considering the fact that I approach most work in the context of Marx’s thinking of a Socialist Utopia - and before you ask, that simply put means putting the collective well-being over the glorified bullshit of the individual, we will focus on the problems with those two ideas and how we can potentially reconcile them for our future.
The linguistic nuances associated with the word Faith are not by accident. Once, Christianity had organized itself into a real-world hierarchical power structure it needed a tool to cement and expand itself. That parasitic nature of greed should be easily identifiable in most power based structures, such as Capitalism for example. At the core of this tool is the concept of Faith in Christianity, the belief without the need of rational proof in a life after death that is better than the one you are currently suffering in, and to be sure, any time prior to World War 2 included unspeakable amounts of suffering for anyone not born rich, so they had plenty to go on. If we reverse engineer said philosophical onion one can easily understand the evolving infrastructure of the Christian Church and their many tools they have put to use. With that, the solution is quite simple - one of the wonderful thing about linguistics and language is that we collective determine the meaning of words and their cultural impact. Much in the way that I was taught to re-imagine the word Faith outside of my own Christian upbringing, I do think that it is not only possible, but reasonable, to use the word when we speak about the un-rational belief in our capability to overcome greed. I am certain that there is a reason-based scientific approach this problem, one, despite the intrinsic wish of many Marxists, Karl Marx didn’t answer. I don’t know enough about psychology and psychiatry as a medical field to know if overcoming greed has been approached, and if it hasn’t, I am sure it will be. Nevertheless, from a practical point of view for you and me, let’s take the imaginary step and believe that we can overcome and thus move forward. By identifying this irrational belief in us humans we can reclaim the word Faith outside of Christianity, or any organized religion.
As to the rational, philosophical part of this discussion, obviously, we cannot examine Marx’s work for our purposes without acknowledging, Kant, Hegel, Mainländer, Schoppenhauer even Freud and Darwin, and that’s just scratching the surface. Again, these analysis’, even purely historically speaking, have taken me years to (potentially) understand and if anyone is interested in these I would be more than happy to point out further reading. It is a wildly fascinating discussion but one that will only obfuscate my point here.
Karl Marx is well known as an atheist who had strong criticisms of all religious practice. Much of his critique of religion had been derived from Ludwig Feuerbach, who claimed that God is merely a psychological projection meant to compensate for the suffering people feel. Rejecting wholesale the validity of such wishful thinking, Marx claimed not only that all sufferings are the result of economic class struggle but that they could be alleviated by means of a Communist revolution that would eliminate economic classes altogether. Moreover, Marx claimed that religion was a fundamental obstacle to such a revolution, since it was an “opiate” that kept the masses quiescent. Religious beliefs thus arise from a cognitive malfunction: they emerge from a “perverted world consciousness.” Only a classless communist society, which Marx thought would emerge when capitalism met its necessary demise, would eliminate religion and furnish true human emancipation. With that, we have the premise that religion, and in the Marxian linguistic context ,Faith, has no place on our journey towards the future, that only reason can free us from the shackles of greed, and thus the economic system we exist in.
This is where I break with Marx, not in the practical, realistic, rational understanding of any organized religion, but in the sense that the idea of Faith, linguistically and culturally reappropriated cannot be a significant building block for a better tomorrow. Marx was entirely correct in his analysis of organized religion and the tools it applies to offer solace from suffering, of course, yet, the starting point for change requires Faith, until we can scientifically and reasonably argue for the stepping stone to be build outside the belief in ones self and ourselves.
With that, I wanted to end this email to you at the end of this insanely challenging year for all of us with words of belief, faith and hope. I do believe that each one of us has it in themselves to overcome greed. I have faith in our collective ability to serve one another outside of the indoctrinated individualistic building stone of capitalism that we serve and do not profit from. Lastly, I hope this train of thought finds you well, gives you food for thought and a possible change in perception.
I will leave you with two quotes to ponder on and say thank for your time, support, attention and bid you a safe journey into the new year. Much love to you all,
Steven.
“Man’s development requires his capacity to transcend the narrow prison of his ego, his greed, his selfishness, his separation from his fellow man, and, hence, his basic loneliness. This transcendence is the condition for being open and related to the world, vulnerable, and yet with an experience of identity and integrity; of man’s capacity to enjoy all that is alive, to pour out his faculties into the world around him, to be “interested”; in brief, to be rather than to have and to use are consequences of the step to overcome greed and egomania.”
“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime. There is no sense in hoping for that which already exists or for that which cannot be. Those whose hope is weak settle down for comfort or for violence; those whose hope is strong see and cherish all signs of new life and are ready every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born.”
― Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology
♥