Consciousness, Culture, and the Unnameable
Culture, Patriotism, Characteristics, and Faith
Link to the relevant article https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/review-of-immanuel-nesss-migration-as-economic-imperialism-by-carlos-l-garrido
When a physical defect or injury causes someone to realign their normal movements to accommodate the injury, over time, the consciousness of the body, can become what is called “mal-adapted’. The injury produces a warp in ordinary consciousness that can in turn lead to the development of quite profound distortions in perception. This is something I know about only too well. It is not that the distorted consciousness has no basis; it has the physical injury underlying it, and is an adaptation for continuing operation with the injury. But it is a self-perpetuating false consciousness which is a problem in itself while also covering over the underlying condition. Just as in the person, so too in the society. The capitalist mode of production forces a distorted social consciousness, one in which the natural interests of the vast body of the people are inverted to align with those interests of the ruling class.
The following is a paragraph from a recent and excellent essay by prof Carlos Garrido on the nature and function of this phenomenon.
‘This structurally necessary ideological inversion will later be labelled by Engels false consciousness, a condition where the people are unaware of the “real driving forces which move [them], [instead] imagin[ing] false or apparent driving forces.” This prevents bourgeois ideologues from properly understanding the world – it subdues their ability to obtain truth in their work. However, this is far from being only a question of errors in thinking, that is, the problem of ideological false consciousness, contrary to popular belief and those of the post-modernized Western “Marxist” specialists, is far from being merely one of consciousness. The inverted character of ideologue’s ideas is a reflection of an objective social order that requires its inhabitants to think of it in deliberately inverted ways. In short: the ‘error in thinking’ is an objective necessity for our social order, a social order that requires the generalization of mistaken views of itself for its own reproduction.’
In Buddhist terms, the painful warp is the concatenation of the three poisons. These distortions are not rooted in either ‘ordinary mind’ alone, nor in ‘material form’ alone, but in a field prior to the separation (discrimination/ abstraction of) of mind and matter, subject and object etc; ignorance (that there is no substantial enduring entity called the ‘self’ in experience), desire (based on this ignorance, grasping for a permanence for this imaginary self), anger/aversion ( protecting this eternalised and imagined form of the ordinary self).
The way to liberation in Buddhist terms begins necessarily within a person’s ordinary mind, with the recognition that the view of a substantial self is false and deluding, so in that sense it is necessarily an ‘individual’s’ effort. However, both Marx’s (and Engels’) and the Buddhist ways emphasize the negative character of the ordinary sense of self. As Marx has it, false consciousness is necessarily promoted by the capitalist character of the society’s mode of production, serving to maintain and enhance the wealth and power of the ruling capitalist class. In the Buddhist way, the delusion is deeper and the solution is more thorough and even extreme.
However, I think this once again reveals a compatibility between these philosophies. Of course, it shouldn’t be thought that I am promoting a religious synthesis, or evangelising in the name of Buddhism here. All great religions have, especially in their more esoteric and mystical traditions, a way to deemphasize the ordinary self and open a vista within that encompasses a far vaster and yet paradoxically, far more intimate, view of existence.
On Characteristics and tradition
‘the identity that is named is not the living identity’ ,
‘what is articulated about the self, either as ‘a people’ or a ‘person’ is an objectification, a contrivance and not the real’
‘Principles remain, details change. That is the Great Way’
One of the things I envy about China as a westerner is that their tradition, of 4,000 years, pivots on a fundamental realisation of the nature of life. Confucianism and Daoism, the Five Classics and Four Books, all the great sages and holy teachers of their past and present understand what tradition really means: underlying general principles from which the ever changing experience of life emerges and finds anchor. They do not, as has been done in the west, treat the details as the permanent fixtures. That is to say, they don’t make a category error.
What a Confucian philosopher of a thousand years ago might have regarded as a law or social custom, another from a hundred years later, or from today would without undue stress consign to the redundancy bin. That is a true, properly functioning tradition. And these philosophers and scholars sometimes disagreed on very big details: the nature of the Divine, the roles of men and women, the state set-up. Big variances. But the Way was and is always the Way. It ‘moves' and changes, and so everything should be open to at least the possibility of change in our ideas and attitudes, yet it is always just the Way and the change is according to an underlying Principle (li).
I’m reminded here of similar notions and potentialities in what has been considered western tradition, which have often not been properly held in focus. The Judaeo-Christian God ‘moves in mysterious ways” “ways that are not the ways of man”. And yet, scholars of our ossified religious tradition still exhaust themselves on fixed details which may have made sense once, but which now obviously lie behind attitudes contrary to the fundamental principles of justice, love and fellowship of humanity.
In Islam, God is the Real Supreme creative will, beholden to none, ultimate of Goodness, Who is not even to be fixed according to human names, but is addressed by the very best terms which human language can fashion. Therefore, why would we assume that God has ceased for one second to be creatively engaged in the world or in human experience?
I’m a follower of an explicitly dharmic religion. This means that the concept of eternal principle and constant change is foremost. It means that daily, hourly I’m reminded that I should self-examine to see if I have in fact been acting, speaking and thinking with a mind open to the complexities of life, open to the myriad changes, open to really appreciating the different stances and actions, attitudes of others while at the same time cleaving to basic values of promoting compassion, well-being, happiness and peace and avoiding or mitigating harm and suffering. For this the hinge is happily one which manifests the universal and ecumenical nature of human ethical and spiritual value. It is a combination of maxims from both Confucianism and Christianity : “do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself” “do unto others as you would wish done to you”.
Tradition, living and true, is necessarily a combination of acceptance of change through the activity of understanding according to principle.
I have heard it said that suspicion of government, institutions, and the elite is a characteristic of the American people. Insofar as accepting these stereotypes goes, I certainly see value in cultivating this suspicion by socialists to organise for the transfer of state power.
However, the direction of this cultivated suspicion is important. If it is not informed by rational understanding of the nature of the state etc, as well as the real context of life and death and instead simply reinforces the irrational and the false, how then is that helping the people?
By not directing the suspicion towards real power, and allowing it to flow into what is often dangerous (to life and wellbeing) fantasy, how is that anything other than gravely hurting the people?
How is hurting the people in the least bit patriotic? How is reinforcing popular contrarianism and the obscurantism foisted on the people by their exploiters and abusers other than unpatriotic?
The state and political structure should be entirely concerned with the material well-being and flourishing of the people, the securing in law of their protection, and the planning and maintenance of infrastructure. Culture is what the people present naturally in life. Their creativity is an immanent. The arrangement of material basis is just that. It cannot, should not, extend into arrangement of the artistic, spiritual or what is commonly known as culture, beyond the protecting of the people in their expressions of these. And that touches on this question of ethnicity and national identity.
These are manifestations of living culture. They constantly and naturally transform without becoming ossified into set identification. Do that (as in, reify identity) and you both stunt cultural life and set up illusory distinctions. That’s just asking for intercommunal bloodshed. More than that, it's reifying and granting new life to dead, divisive ideas that should have been (were generally) ditched long ago.
One cannot denounce on the one hand racial, or religious, or ethnic discrimination in a country while on the other advocate for the ghettoising of groups of the citizenry based on these distinctions. It’s incoherent, yes but more than just that. It’s had horrible examples of lasting antagonism and suffering as its consequence.
The partition of India and Pakistan based on religio-cultural division engendered monstrous spates of communal massacres, and played right into the hands of the Imperial state of Britain. Notice how I say “the Imperial state of Britain” and not just “the British”. It’s something I’m going to have to get use to doing, because all of this ethnic labelling has become just another swamp for misunderstandings that can be used by sinister interests.
Ireland has had centuries of bloodshed based on the misapplication of religion and ethnicity to the struggle for the democratic and material enfranchisement of the people of the island in a modern republic. And it still is being intentionally abused in such a way.
It may be an inconvenient truth, but a truth nonetheless, that the founders of the republican struggle were not “ethnically gaelic” or whatever bizarre racialised woo is read into ancient people inhabiting the land. They were not even religiously motivated other than their recognition that the people of Ireland had been oppressed and dispossessed by the Imperial regime by the use of religious and cultural identity. Those things were weaponised against the people. Transcending these things was the catalyst and right thrust for liberation.
Allowing the schemes of the oppressor state to foment political division based on this inappropriate identitarianism has been a legacy of horror and blood. The country has a name. The people of the country are it’s people. No further admitted distinctions are necessary or useful in the project of the creation of a progressive, people’s republic.
It’s the enemies of republic that insist on ID politics. It’s the quislings that are the avowed “nationalists”, draping the domination of money and international capitalism in vapid fairytale costume and symbolism. That’s the real distinction. Patriotism is for all the people in a country as they are. Therefore it's real, natural without the attendant identity splitting fictional overlays of nationalism that serve to ossify the people's living culture and turn them into objects to be marketed and abused.
Culture, even genuine folk-culture, can only have an authentic life if it is unpolluted by the abuse of it through political weaponisation.
The very concept of being a “religious/ethnic nationalist” is a blasphemy and useful lie for those who would oppress and exploit the people. In short, ethnic nationalism amounts to nothing much more than tacky Hollywood-eque propaganda.