My friend, the brilliant Yoav Netzer, said two interesting things:
1. That a racist is one who destroys the race.
2. That nationalism damaged Race by extending belonging to something that is not integral to the natural systems of culture and thought of individuals marked by genetic traits.
This leads me to the question of myth. The Nazis, because they knew the ideas holding nations were thinning out without the church, tried to fuse it with race — but they also knew it was a problem to fuse the two without a mythic foundation. Almost any fusion that is not scientific, that is grounded in culture, requires a myth.
I think what happened is this. The classical liberal left shattered the foundation of monarchy, and with it, of course, the power of the Church. Then, from the moment the völkisch political right adopted socialism, the right also collapsed from within, by turning blood into a social and racial myth rather than a religious one.
The tragedy is fusion without transcendence, in an age when transcendence has lost its credibility.
It is a tragedy identified well by Barak Hess who argued that we live in the age of the social. Antisemitism, incidentally, is precisely the hatred of that persistent shadow — monotheistic, transcendent, anti-social.
I wonder, then, what kind of theology can still emerge from this situation. I think Europe has in effect killed the concept of a God as a living foundation, and only the left, paradoxically, is able to contain him — within the very social category it created, which killed him in the first place — in the form of Islam.
And this proves the power of the social idea to kill transendence and revive another, even if the revival is undertaken for the most cynical of reasons. And thus the social is the ultimate secularizer for his ability to create a shift from one idea as representation and meaning to another within its own shifting system.
And at its core is probably the dialectics of Hegel + the Goethe religion of phenomena + Feuerbach's anthropology of theology. Hegel's dialectics moving religion from a vertical to a horizontal axis, Goethe turning a search for some essential phenomena itself to the core meaning of culture, instead of faith, and Feuerbach's turning of theology into anthropology.
Showing us, that secularism in itself is nothing more than a shift in axis of meaning that can be contained within a larger axis of perception and logic, that necessitates a re-thinking of meaning and values and action which happen when myths are examined, with the possibility of turning the objects or methods or conclusions and mechanisms of examination related to them, into a myth in themselves.
Usually, the more groundbreaking the paradigm the more radical the political realignment which may follow.
Collectivism?
And in that sense, this moment of the secular, where actions and meaning happen in a political field out of the church begins in Protestant England, but never reaches mythical independence until it fuses into a socialist revolution, that can contain Goethe, Hegel and Feuerbach into Marx. Trying to shed itself from the individual-image of God space.
These are the categories that enable secularism. They indeed move first through an imagination of a general will, but they need not only the emptying of the space from the sacred, they also need a language of meaning which can ascribe material (Marx) phenomena (Goethe) redemptive meaning (Hegel) in the eyes of a social gaze (Feuerbach) to become independent and produce independent power.
And even so, afterwards they will necessitate an alternative theology, and that necessitating is itself the peak moment, for the imposing of atheism itself (like in Albania) is a theological moment, it is only absolute entropy which is secular.
And thus it is never achieved, but all which can be achieved are shifts in an axis of categories of meaning, away from types of monotheism, and into other forms of imagism and idealism.
In this, secular is only a counter idea to monism, which enters itself into the concept of society via the political/economic.
I wonder, then, what horizon remains for this culture, at this crossroads.
