“The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver. As such, it is atheistic in all the wrong ways, whereas Marx and Nietzsche are atheistic in what are by and large the right kinds of ways. A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut the kind of depth where theological questions can even properly be raised, just as it rules out political and moral questions of a certain profundity. What on earth would be the point of God in such a setup, other than as ideological legitimation, spiritual nostalgia, or a means of private extrication from a valueless world?
“One place where so-called spiritual values, driven from the place of brutally pragmatic capitalism, have taken refuge is New Ageism, which is just the sort of caricature of the spiritual one would expect a materialistic civilization to produce. Rather as those with hearts of stone tend to weep at schmaltzy music, so those who would not recognize a genuine spiritual value if it fell into their laps tend to see the spiritual as spooky, ethereal, and esoteric….
“…. Nobody is more otherworldly than the worldly, nobody more soft-centered than the hard-nosed. Spiritual matters must naturally be as remote from their lawyers, minders, agents, and hairstylists as one could imagine, in order to provide some fantasy alternative to them…. Money is a great breeder of unreality. The idea that spirituality is about visiting the sick and fighting injustice would no doubt strike these Kabbalists, necromancers, and chiropractors of the psyche as intolerably prosaic. Even their minders and hairstylists can do that.”
Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp.39-41.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
DmL 05.24.09 at 6:11 pm
Well, I think he’s talking about “capitalism” as most people think of it, which is more materialism, rather than the pure economic system, but otherwise I agree.
Kim 05.24.09 at 9:03 pm
Hi DmL,
No, Eagleton is talking about (late, global) capitalism - Eagleton is a reconstructed Marxist - though he would see capitalism more as a process than a system - “a process,” as his mentor Herbert McCabe puts it, “of [class] struggle, of competition…. What is wrong with capitalism is simply that it is based on human antagonism, and it is precisely here that it comes into conflict with Christianity.” Both, I think, would also say that capitalism is intrinsically amoral, indeed nihilistic. They’re not wrong.
Wood 05.26.09 at 8:27 am
Thanks for posting this. It’s brilliant.
Graham 05.26.09 at 10:28 am
This post and the one before are amazing!
Thanks so much.
There is a Martyn Joseph song called ‘celebrity’ that says a lot. I particularly like the couplet:
‘I’m spiritual with a cookbook coming out’- I think Eagleton underscores this well (with more words and not so much music!).
I may magpie this post….
DH 06.02.09 at 5:19 pm
pure Marxism is just as atheistic as pure Capitalism. The forced stealing from one group of people to another is just as condemned by Scripture as people who hoard, materialistic, etc. Communism is also amoral and nihilistic. To think otherwise is ignorant. The fact remains as an economic system pure Communism has never worked.
Richard 06.02.09 at 6:13 pm
What is this “pure” Marxism and Capitalism?
DH 06.02.09 at 7:36 pm
“pure” in the sense of what Dml said. The context is equivilent.