In matters of pluralism, dialogue and respect for differences, it is always convenient to distinguish between the just principle of secularism and its miserable deviation which is secularism. The former claims the primacy of the State over religion, recognizing the freedom of worship of every citizen. The second, on the other hand, coincides with the pretension of integral desymbolization, that is to say with the cancellation of all space of the sacred. The principle of secularism respects the presence of the sacred and of religion, distinguishing them from the space of the profane and asking that, in turn, the latter be respected in its otherness with respect to the religious. The principle of secularism, which is as infamous a perversion of secularism as fundamentalism is of religion, aims on the contrary at universal profanation, i.e. the cancellation of the spaces of the sacred and the transcendent, liquidated en bloc as fanatical and intolerant, dogmatic and not up to the standards of the “secular city.”
Religion and secularism can and must act together, recognizing and respecting each other’s reasons and regions. Secularism is, however, a variant of religious fundamentalism, of which it is posed, precisely, as the atheistic variant but no less dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant. It is, so to speak, the specific fundamentalism of a civilization that believes in nothing and that makes of the atheism of indifference itself a sectarian and intransigent dogma, which absolutizes immanence and de-transcendentalizes the real.
From a different perspective, secularism, which is another name for the most unbridled atheism, coincides with the religious fundamentalism of the nihilistic time proper to the technocapitalist system and its tendency to that divinization of the world which is coessential to its integral commercialization. For this reason, following a classic exemplum of the falsely emancipatory battle that the dominant order promotes as the only and total panorama, those who fight in the name of secularism against the Crucifix and against all the other symbols of religion, lead a battle that coincides with that successfully waged by the nihilism of consumer civilization and by its homogenization of space under the sign of the commodity form.
According to Ratzinger’s interpretation, “secularism is an ideology” to complement the technonihilist civilization: more explicitly, “ secularism is not that element of neutrality, which opens spaces of freedom for all. It is beginning to transform itself into an ideology that imposes itself through politics and does not grant public space to the Catholic and Christian vision”, aiming at the relativistic emptying of all public space. For this reason, again in Ratzinger’s words, “we can accept laicism, properly understood. But we are opposed to an ideological secularism that threatens to enclose the Church in a ghetto of subjectivity” and to impose an emptying of the sense of the sacred and of ethics that is only functional to the fundamentalist absolutism of merchandise and its relativism. “Right secularism ,” writes Ratzinger, ‘is freedom of religion,’ which is therefore a totally different thing from secularist fundamentalism, which aspires to annihilate all religion. In the name of secular dogmatism, “faith is tolerated as a private opinion, but in such a way that it is not ultimately tolerated in its essence”. Therefore, according to Ratzinger, Christianity cannot accept secularism, because that would be tantamount to accepting its own extinction: “faith does not seek conflict, it seeks a space of freedom and mutual tolerance. But neither can it accept formulations that propose to standardize it and make it compatible with modernity.”
Crutch of the new fuchsia and rainbow left, reconverted from the cause of labor to the cause of capital and its planetary order, the Brancaleone army of the secularist capita insanabilia (incurable heads) fights today against the religion of transcendence and, at the same time, has nothing to object to the new hyperimmanentist monotheism of the market and the pathological society on which it is founded: a society in which the sexual sphere is hypertrophically exhibited and the religious sphere is shamefully hidden; in which the symbols of the sacred are cancelled and space is left only for the symbols of merchandise and fashion. Also in this sense, the regressive myth of Progress is elevated to a new religion of the new desacralized time: in the era of technocapitalism Progress means nothing other than mere technical development, the simple empowerment of the apparatus of production and the disempowering efficiency of the markets; or to put it with Pasolini, the “mechanical and irreversible destruction of values”. The expansion of secularist fundamentalism indicates, as Ratzinger pointed out, that atheism “is beginning to become the fundamental public dogma.”
By questioning all Absolutes other than the immanent one of capitalist production, which is in fact cheered and praised as the primary source of all political and social rationality, the “Brancaleone armada” of fundamentalist secularism presents itself as the ideal ideological complement to economic fanaticism, in which The Economist becomes the L’Osservatore Romano of capitalist globalization and the inscrutable laws of the monotheistic God become the inflexible laws of the cosmopolitanized market. This is the Kafkaesque metamorphosis of the Left in the West, which has taken it from the red of modern revolution to the fuchsia of postmodern whimsy, from the hammer and sickle of labor to the droit-de’l’hommiste rainbow, and even from the struggle against imperialism to its open defense, as we have already explained at length on other occasions. The fulfillment of this metamorphic parable seems to be registered in the abandonment of Marx, as the point of reference of the communist revolution, in favor of Darwin, assumed as the new champion of atheistic scientism in which the liberal and postmodern new left identifies itself, playing also in this aspect the role of guardian of the new global-capitalist order. Darwin has been deformed by the order of the discourse of the new Left in a caricatured and, at times, grotesque manner, to the point of turning him into the effigy of the scientific legitimization of atheism as the new central figure of liberal progressivism and its univocal struggle for the progress of technocapital.
By the way, the Gramsci of the Prison Notebooks had already warned that, in the regime of advanced capitalism, the Church and, in general, religion would no longer be a “world ideological power” but only a “subaltern force”. For his part, Pasolini added that this “subalternity”, in the Gramscian sense, had been redefined in the meantime, with the epiphany of consumer civilization, as opposition and irreconcilability between capital and religion, between sacred transcendence and market immanence. The current liberal, anti-Gramscian and anti-Pasolinian left-wing fuchsias, in the end, have chosen to fully and unreservedly support the reasons of secular fundamentalism akin to the new spirit of capitalism. In the context of the clash between sacredness and reification they have positioned themselves, in fact, on the side of the latter. Precisely in this, through an illuminism at the service of obscurantism, the progressive secularism of the liberal New Left reveals its nature of enlightened fundamentalism emptied of its noble emancipatory function and reduced to a simple expressive function of the neoliberal oligarchic bloc and its ultra-capitalist struggles against any divinity not in line with the market.
The struggle against religion, which in the epoch of dialectical capitalism could also express in part a progressive instance of criticism of the society of the Ancien Régime (religiously founded as an expression of the divine order, given the “very close connection between devotion and social order”), is reconfirmed as a quintessentially adaptive and organic figure to the dominant bloc, within the framework of the new spirit of absolute-totalitarian capitalism and its practices of integral desacralization of the world of life. The battle that secularism is waging today against religion does not aim, in the last instance, to produce the emancipation of man, but rather techno-scientific progress, the triumphal march of the new market order. For the coryphaeus of secularism as the new fundamentalism of capital, submission to religious superstition must be deconstructed, so that superstition and submission sub specie oeconomica dominate unquestionably. They do not want to understand or, in any case, they fail to understand how today the greatest superstition and the greatest fanaticism are those linked to the world of integral commercialization and to the credo quia absurdum of the absolute rationality of the markets, of which they end up being apologists, whether they want to or not, in the very act with which they direct the “weapons of criticism” against the religion of transcendence but never against the order of planetary alienation.
For the varied and colorful “Brancaleone army” of secularist fundamentalism and neoliberal progressivism, by virtue of which – as Ratzingeremphasized – “it is no longer tolerated that the Catholic Church can express herself on her own identity and her own faith”, obedience must be reserved only for the economy, for the “challenges of globalization”, for the unappealable judgment of the market, for the bond of debt and for the despotism of the rating agencies. Herein lies the character of today’s triumphant “religious atheism” of the Brancaleone armada of secularism. It is a form of atheism that is intrinsically religious, above all because it transforms the non-existence of God into an article of a faith that often acquires the character of fundamentalism and causes secularism, which aspired to be the antithesis of religion, to be dialectically transformed into a new form of intolerant fundamentalism. Hodern atheism is simply faith in the world of markets, therefore faith in nothingness and the inevitable corollary of nihilism.
With the grammar of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Enlightenment (Aufklärung) and Faith -apparently opposed- turn out in reality to be secretly complementary: the one is invested in the other, since both have in common faith in the separate, in the Object thought of as given presence to which the Subject is called to adapt, be it the God of the heavens or raison as être suprême or, in the present time, the Market as objectivity sacralized by itself. The only difference,“ Hegelexplains, ‘is that Enlightenment exists primarily as self-satisfied and without ’unhappy consciousness,” where “Faith is unsatisfied Enlightenment” (unbefriedigte Aufklärung). Enlightenment rejects faith, and faith rejects Enlightenment: each one denies the altera pars and thus ignores one’s own identity with the rejected one.
Secularism is thus a form of religious atheism or, if one prefers, of liberal-nihilistic atheistic fundamentalism, also because of the fact that it operates ideologically in the sense of a delegitimization of the traditional God, which proves functional to the sanctification of the monotheism of the market as the only permitted theological perspective. For this reason, the critique of economic theology today must contain within it a parallel critique of religious atheism as its fundamental expressive function. The religion of the free market and the techno-scientific system is therefore governed by a particular religious figure, which is recognized in secularist fundamentalism.
The materialist atheism of certain French Enlightenment scholars, such as La Mettrie or d’Holbach, was intrinsically dialectical, since, on the one hand, it already legitimized the new spirit of capitalism and its reduction of beings to de-spiritualized and calculable matter; and, on the other, by celebrating “the day on which the last king will be strangled with the entrails of the last priest,” it delegitimized in an emancipatory and progressive way the normative pretensions of a late-feudal and lordly hierarchical ideology, embedded in the Christian religion (in both its Catholic and Protestant variants) and in the idea of a “master” God to be submitted to (this is how the anarchist motto ni Dieu ni maître should be read). According to this hermeneutic line, simplifying and incapable of understanding the essence of religion, but of undoubted value if contextualized at the time of its critical exercise, religion would be a deception of cunning priests to the detriment of the revolutionary masses or, alternatively, a collective hallucination of minds that have not reached the maturity of those who use their own intelligence and know how to maintain a critical relationship with both Heaven and earth: the explosive liberating derivative would be that of a world without masters or gods above it, but only Kantian starry skies for autonomous subjects. For its part, contemporary atheism, in the context of the concrete turbo-capitalist power relation, appears devoid of this dialectical ambivalence: it is totally complementary to the spirit of the age for the reasons already mentioned, from the neutralization of the sacred to mass individualization, from the deconstruction of every taboo to the planetary homologation of the world under the sign of desacralized immanentism, from the loss of interest in the problem of truth to the dissolution of every identity that is not integrally coherent with the marketized world.
Atheistic secularism is always characterized by being oriented to deny religion, which in turn is presented sic et simpliciter, in a caricatured if not psychomaniacal way, as the apotheosis of ignorance and superstition. Thus we can read it, among many others of the same tenor, in books such as, Por qué no podemos ser cristianos y menos aún católicos [Why we cannot be Christians and even less Catholics] (2007) by Piergiorgio Odifreddi and Contro il sacro: perché le fedi ci rendono stupidi [Against the sacred: why faiths make us stupid] (2016) by Edoardo Boncinelli. Both, though in different ways, argue that, in the age of the splendor of science, only fools can still believe in God. Now, if indeed the ratio of atheism were the negation of religious fundamentalism and human superstition, as its standard-bearers claim, it would not be explained why, in their main expressive figures, they do not take a stand against the greatest fundamentalism and against the greatest superstition, that is to say against technocapitalism elevated to an immutable, eternal and inexorable god and against its main dogmas ( Robinsonian centrality of Western individualism, interventionist theology of human rights and ethical bombardments, blind faith in the anonymous mechanisms of the deregulated economy).
Contemporary critics of religion, as eager to criticize Heaven as they are unwilling to criticize what happens on earth, have not gone much further than Nietzsche and his anathema: religion as an “abortion” produced by the rancor of a race of failures who, through it, impose on the best a perverse ethic of equality and love, thus intoxicating life with a sense of guilt. The judgment, in a very different sphere of thought, is corroborated by Freud of Civilization and its Discontents (also translated as The Unrest in Culture), who identifies in the phenomenon of religion only the profile of weakness and infantilism, of the will to be a servant and of the lowest mediocrity. None of these interpreters, not even the most refined ones such as Freud and Nietzsche, have grasped what Hegel, more than any other, has thematized; that is, the veritative character of religion as a representation of the Absolute that does not collide with reason, but completes it with a different expressive form.
This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.
Featured: A Church Interior with Figures, by Hendrik van Steenwijk the Younger; painted ca. 1617-1649.
