Polytheism and Monotheism

Subject: Re: Polytheism and Monotheism Fri Jan 08, 2016 5:31 am

"Monohumanism": From Monotheism to Communism via Secular Humanism, i.e. J.-Xt. Atheism

Sloterdijk wrote:: "This atheism claims it is fulfilling the truth of the three monotheisms by transferring them back to earth from heaven. It appears under the name of Communism, whose root communio evokes the synthesis of past peoples of God – Israel, the church and the ummah. The term itself implicitly expresses the new political universalism's objection to the historical folk traditions, which, from the perspective of avant-garde morality, merit only contempt: only people who are too stupid to become general producers, i.e. true human beings, carry their communal membership around with them like the flag of an organization. Similar ideas had been anticipated by Christianity and Islam. The new faith went further, propagating the thesis that it had shown the valid basis for every membership in God's community that was still possible among humans, with the international industrial proletariat at its centre as its miserable and creative elite.

Against this background, we can explain the philosophical meaning of the project known as Communism once again. In accordance with its dogmatic quality, it consisted in an abrogation of all earlier prophetic statements and their reformulation in a language of realism, where the latter was conceived in a dual sense – both as economic production, a metabolic exchange between humans and nature, and as political practice, as an appropriation of the humanly possible by real human beings. The expressions ‘real human being’ and ‘revolutionary’ now become synonymous. That would mean the baton of prophetism was handed from Moses to Jesus, from Jesus to Mohammed, and from Mohammed to Marx. Marx would have rejected the religious narrowness of his predecessors and sought to put an end to all mystified forms of revelation. He would have placed the truths of the religions on trial before the worldly sciences and proletarian passions. He would, like any fair judge, have allowed them to act as the ‘soul of a heartless world’, but nonetheless rejected the majority of their statements in order to replace them with a political practice that acted in favour of real human beings.

It was precisely this expectation that had to remain essentially unfulfilled in the spheres of activity of the religions that have existed so far, as they always involved classes of people, the ones known as rulers, who prevented the vast majority of others, those known as the oppressed and exploited, from freely producing and appropriating their own selves. Ironically enough, the clerics of the three-ring religions, especially the extremely feudalized high clergy in Christianity, were also among the oppressed classes, which meant that one could not expect any direct help from them in reaching the goal of general emancipation. Is that not why the Protestant Reformation revolted against the arrogance of the ruling Roman church? Did the theologian Martin Dibelius not see valid reasons, even in the middle of the twentieth century, to refer to the church as the ‘bodyguard of despotism and capitalism’? Understandably, depriving the exploitative clergy of its power must be declared a fundamental prerequisite for the realization of those prophecies through which the wearers of the fourth ring sought to make themselves agreeable to their fellow humans. In order to establish this ‘religion of man’ (to apply a phrase of Rousseau's reference to Communism), however, it became inevitable that the pleasant would be preceded by the terrible. Only one thing was certain for the zealots of humanity: as long as the lords of the older rings exercised their power over people's souls, human beings would not infinitely transcend the human, but rather fall infinitely short of themselves.

The Communists worked consistently on the development of an anthropological supremacism of a resolutely anti-religious character. In this undertaking it was allowed – in fact necessary – to blaspheme the imaginary Highest in the name of the real highest. Each effective blasphemy meant an overstepping of the ‘existing’ towards liberating excess. This is the meaning of the ‘passion for the real’ (passion du réel), which, according to a shrewd observation by Alain Badiou, was the hallmark of the twentieth century. In the parlance of the zealots of humanity, the movement through which human beings with a low standing could potentially attain the level of the highest human being was known as ‘revolution’. Because revolution constituted a translation of revelation into political practice, however, it shared its risk of excessive haste. It too, while still caught up in the experiment of creating wealth, ignored the question of whether the conditions were right and the means sufficiently tested and sought to force results that would be impossible to overtake at later stages of the world's development.

The rest of the story is well known. Within a few generations, after some successful conversions at the start, the fourth ring made its wearer the object of almost unconditional disgust without giving him any chance to make himself agreeable to God as a compensation. The hatefulness of what was done in the name of Communism was demonstrated to the extreme for judgement by all normal humans – and if one still occasionally encounters the opinion that the atrocities committed on the other side surpassed those of Communism, it is primarily because those in the corresponding circles refuse to accept the facts: with over 100 million lost lives, the degree of human extermination achieved in Communist systems is several times higher than that of Hitler's regime, which has – understandably – been given the title of absolute evil. The question arises whether a co-absolute evil should not have been added to the collective consciousness long ago.

For the majority of people at that time, it remained unclear to what extent the Soviet and Chinese dramas constituted a parody of religious history since the caesura on Mount Sinai. Moses' command ‘let every man kill his brother, his friend and his neighbour’ was obviously only followed on a grand scale by the ideologues of humanity in the twentieth century; one had to wait until the advent of monohumanism to witness the hubristic seeds of monotheism bloom. The lesson of this unprecedented episode would prove difficult to forget: if it is already precarious to make people feel enthusiasm for a God who demands too much of them, even if it is to their own advantage, then it is completely impossible to turn people into zealots of humanity beyond brief moments of hysteria – least of all by the methods with which the Russian and Chinese Communists sought to achieve their goals." [God's Zeal]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*