Do Your Part to Save the Scene: Reflections on Marxism as a Secular Religion

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Picking A Belief System and Sticking to It (Do Your Part to Save the Scene)
Reflections on Marxism as a Secular Religion


I was born and raised without a concrete religious identity.  my lapsed Catholic mother exposed me to the softest edge of liberal organized religion, Unitarian Universalism, for a few years.  it did not fill the gap, and it must not have been working for her, either, as we stopped going as suddenly as we had started.

as such, on an emotional-existential level, I was on my own.  this is not a unique phenomenon in the 21st Century: tens, or even hundreds of millions, of Western adolescents in the past few decades have been raised without religion.  but, I will claim, my situation is uniquely dire.  I cannot prove it, but I fashion myself as being on the outer-edge of self-awareness: I believe that my knowledge of myself, my feelings, and my impotence to create and alter the situations that define me, put me in the 99th percentile of the Self-Awareness Category, however defined. 

this, combined with the lack of an institutional, organized religious framework to appeal to in times of existential want, has at times produced a stilting anomie.  in my moments and phases of greater resentment, it's driven me to a dark and despairing nihilism.  it may work for some people, and more power to them, but nihilism failed me: it led to a constant treading of the fine line between self-pity and self-loathing, a fetishization of self-destruction and chronic inaction.  this is not a space which I wish to spend any more of my time.

so, where to go?  as I wrote in 2010 on a topic that anticpated this one, "we all crave our dramas, and they all require faith; what gives?"  an influential thinker on my experience in this realm is David Sprintzen, a political activist on my native Long Island and retired Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Long Island University - C.W. Post.  his latest work, Critique of Western Philosophy and Social Theory, tackles part of this problem: as he puts it, "the existential drama at the heart of the modern world."  he argues that Western-driven modernity (or postmodernity, if you prefer) has been unable to reconcile the catastrophic effects of the falsification of Christianity... leading to, if we are to quote the well-executed 1999 film Fight Club, "We are the middle children of history, man.  No purpose or place.  Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives."

Goddamnit, I do not want to be a middle child of history!  my mind is simply too big, my heart beats too loudly, for me to willingly submit to a one-way trip into the Abyss.  I need something to convince me against all odds that this need not be the case.  that there is a coherent, internally consistent, explanatory system that will place me at given coordinates, sympathize, and hand me a tool-kit to fight back against both existential and consumerist nihilism.  and, I am proud to tell you, I've found it!  I've found it, and it's called Marxism.