SHAKSPER 2000: Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 01/19/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0114  Wednesday, 19 January 2000.

[1]     From:   Seán Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Monday, 17 Jan 2000 10:01:18 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[2]     From:   Judith Matthews Craig <je-mc@apex2000.net>
        Date:   Monday, 17 Jan 2000 13:04:16 -0600
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[3]     From:   Judith Matthews Craig <je-mc@apex2000.net>
        Date:   Monday, 17 Jan 2000 13:04:16 -0600
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[4]     From:   Tom Dale Keever <tdk3@columbia.edu>
        Date:   Monday, 17 Jan 2000 18:50:18 -0500 (EST)
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobili

[5]     From:   Clifford Stetner <cstetner@liu.edu>
        Date:   Tuesday, 18 Jan 2000 20:08:32 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Seán Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Monday, 17 Jan 2000 10:01:18 -0800
Subject: 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Abdulla Al-Dabbagh writes:

>I never thought that Marx's remarks on Religion were
>unduly "materialistic". On the contrary, they seemed to me to veer more
>on the psychological side. Of course, here, as in most other places,
>Marx himself was never a "vulgar marxist" or a one-sided reductionist.

I wouldn't suggest that Marx is simplistic, which he isn't, but that
he's totalizing.  While religion may be explained psychologically, the
psychology goes back as you said later in your post, to the alleviation
of pain and suffering, which is, in turn, caused by the misery of social
conditions.  Things get more complicated than in vulgar Marxism,
certainly, but they never fundamentally question the premise that
everything, eventually, goes back to social and material conditions.
Where in normal parlance there are two things-religion and social
conditions-in Marx there is really only one set of material conditions,
which religion mystifies or which produces religion.  This is what I
mean by reductiveness.

In other words, Marx and Marxists can get complicated, but they get
complicated in the same way that Ptolemaic astronomy gets complicated,
maintaining a single model of the universe, but adding various epicycles
and such to explain phenomena.

Cheers,
Seán.

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Judith Matthews Craig <je-mc@apex2000.net>
Date:           Monday, 17 Jan 2000 13:04:16 -0600
Subject: 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Terence Hawkes writes:

<Karen Peterson-Kranz is right. Jan Kott has pointed out <that whilst
the
<influence of Shakespeare on Marx is clear, the influence <of Marx on
<Shakespeare is crucial.

For muddy thinking?  Maybe we should take the Golden Quill from
Shakespeare and give it to Marx.

Judy Craig

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Judith Matthews Craig <je-mc@apex2000.net>
Date:           Monday, 17 Jan 2000 13:09:32 -0600
Subject: 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Abdulla Al-Dabbagh writes:

<For one who devoted his life, presumably, to <understanding
<those conditions of misery and oppression, religion would <not be
<something to be explained away.

From the point of view of someone who has not read these treatises, why
would Marx's systems "so devoted to understanding . . . misery and
oppression" fail so miserably in the real world?  Russia is a mess, and
I always worry somehow that Shakespeare never heard of the man.

Judy Craig

[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Tom Dale Keever <tdk3@columbia.edu>
Date:           Monday, 17 Jan 2000 18:50:18 -0500 (EST)
Subject: 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Abdulla Al-Dabbagh rightly notes:

>Of course, here, as in most other places,
>Marx himself was never a "vulgar marxist" or a one-sided reductionist.
>That famous passage that ends with the 'famous dictum', "it is the opium
>of the people", as I recall, strongly emphasized the subjective role of
>religion as a kind of alleviation for pain and suffering (brought about
>most prominently perhaps by the misery of human social conditions). In
>that same passage, Marx describes religion as "the sigh of the
>oppressed". For one who devoted his life, presumably, to understanding
>those conditions of misery and oppression, religion would not be
>something to be explained away.

He is right to suggest we look to the context of this oft-mouthed
shibboleth before we use it to either embrace or dismiss its author and
his thought.  The passage that we're all laboring so hard to retrieve
from our undergraduate memories is found in Marx's "Toward the Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right [or "Law" in some translations]:
Introduction," a short work, written in Paris in 1843, included in
almost every anthology of Marx's writings.  Here is the paragraph, as it
appears in "Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society,"
edited and translated by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York:
Doubleday, 1967), p. 250:

"Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and at the same
time the protest against real suffering.  Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit
of spiritless conditions.  It is the opium of the people."

This paragraph in isolation fails to convey the rich complexity of this
early meditation on the fundamental relationships between social
institutions like religion and the state and the spiritual needs of the
people, who live and suffer under these institutions and should have the
democratic means to shape them.  Like the rest of Marx's work it has
been reduced to a catchphrase that, once memorized,  substitutes for
real understanding.

Karen Peterson-Kranz's call for open-mindedness is well meaning, but I
wouldn't put Marx and "Mein Kampf" in the same category of
"usefulness."  I can't hope to match Terence Hawkes' characteristic
pithiness, but let me expand briefly on his reference to Kott.

The vital far-reaching complex of theory, history, social conscience,
and world view that takes the name of "Marx" in modern thought has
proven endlessly useful in understanding Shakespeare's age in part
because so many of the crucial social transformations Marx analyzed took
place in England while Shakespeare and his fellow Early Modern
playwrights were producing the most powerful popular literature of that
age.  Anyone who has glanced at a few quotes from Marx in Bartlett's and
decided that there is no point in looking at Early Modern culture
through the lens Marxist analysis affords has not given the period any
serious study.

Those who insist that by spurning Marx they have opted for a point of
view that is not "ideological" are particularly deluded.  They have
merely clung to that most powerful of "ideologies,"  the one that
effectively masquerades as "common sense."

                              Tom Dale Keever
                            Columbia University
                            tdk3@Columbia.edu
                   http://www.columbia.edu/~tdk3

[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Clifford Stetner <cstetner@liu.edu>
Date:           Tuesday, 18 Jan 2000 20:08:32 -0500
Subject: 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0098 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Seán Lawrence feels that:

>... Marx's famous dictum explains religion away-which is to say,
>fails to explain it.  Or rather, it explains religion in the strictly
>materialist terms with which Marx liked to explain everything.  This is
>fundamentally to remove religion, in its ordinary, anti-materialist
>sense, from the picture altogether.  It's elephants all the way down, or
>materiality, to be only slightly more subtle.

But it is materiality all the way down (pace Abdullah's "psychology").
And who says that the "ordinary" sense of religion is anti-materialist?
Perhaps religions trade in all manner of specters, but their dictates
can be quite materialistic.  Churches are material, scriptural texts are
material, wine and crackers are material, tithes and indulgences are
material, the Vatican Bank is material, inquisitions are material,
crusades are material, condoms are material.  Many gods worshiped by
many pagan religions were what you might call material. The only thing
non-material about patriarchal monotheisms is God, and I have yet to be
convinced that I need a materialistic religion to carry on a
relationship with a metaphysical being.

It is the priests and theologians who remove religion from the picture,
who throw up their hands and claim faith as some sort of diplomatic
immunity against reason, while men like Marx and Nietzsche do explain
it.

>With such a totalizing habit of thought behind it, it's no wonder
>Marxism tends towards totalitarianism.

As opposed to the pluralistic habits of thought of the religious?

Judith Craig states frankly that:

>... as a graduate student in the 70's, I was sickened
>by the falsity of such intellectual "games" as Marx was not a factor in
>Shakespeare's time or life

This reasoning would of course reduce the entire history of Shakespeare
criticism after Ben Jonson to the status of intellectual gaming.  Marx
wrote about history, devoting an entire section of Capital to the Early
Modern Period.  Shakespeare also wrote about history.  As I witnessed a
cold war over Marx's interpretation of history both past and present
during my entire life, which resulted in the political conditions under
which I must live, I don't see how using the writings of an historic
figure like Shakespeare to test the strengths and weaknesses of Marx's
theories do not qualify as serious intellectual work.

>and, having some personal background in
>using the Scriptures as a guide for life, took Hamlet's intolerance of
>"equivocation" as a guide for life and left Marx out of my intellectual
>life altogether.

Surely Hamlet condemns his equivocation in failing to act, not in
failing to carefully consider all sides of an argument?

>This approach certainly has not earned me tenure or
>academic friends, but I think it has given me a depth of understanding
>of Shakespeare and his problems that a study of Marx would have denied
>me.

My, how times change.  My father's generation had to repudiate Marx (as
you have done) in order to win tenure and friends.  And I am not certain
that coming out of a neo-Marxist closet in this era of corporatization
of the academy is such a brilliant career move on my own part.  My
cousin is still referred to as Eric the Red by his old professors at
CUNY (and still unemployed).  I do feel, however, that refusing even to
explore one of the major intellectual movements of the past two
centuries is not consistent with the principles of good scholarship.

>I don't know why I "better understand" Marx to have an understanding of
>Shakespeare.  Maybe Marxist criticism does illumine some of Shakespeare,
>but I have not been very convinced by what I have read.  I

Is it not possible that your failure to be very convinced might have
something to do with having left Marx out of your intellectual life
altogether?

>If I like an
>insight from a Marxist critic, fine.  I'll just put in my intellectual
>scenario and still leave Marx out.  My weltanschauung is Biblical and
>religious and not likely to change.

Then you are not likely to like any Marxist insights, and, in keeping
with your Biblical and religious world view, you have simply shut the
door on the discussion before it has begun.

<snip>The whole spirit of the Bible is antithetical to tyranny and
>injustice;

Excuse me?  Is this the bible in which prophets turn children into swine
for laughing at them?  In which entire populations, men, women, and
children are wiped out because God promised the land they were on to
us?  In which the guys in the white hats can engage in genocide,
slavery, and rape, but it's the other guys who are the tyrants?

<snip>Apparently she was inspiring, not because she had used techniques
of
>propaganda which usually result in cynicism and lethargy in the
>auditors, but because she actually effected in the real world a spirit
>of resistance and courage in the face of approaching threat.

Unfortunately, we only have the evidence of state propaganda to make
this assessment.  Don't Shakespeare's Agincourt soldiers exhibit some
cynicism and lethargy?

>After all,
>she is still remembered as one of the greatest English monarchs-largely
>because of this kind of "spunk."

This memory to which you refer was also filtered through her own
extremely busy censors.

<snip>How could a passage written by Marlowe
>surely, but put in the mouth of a character he creates be "evidence that
>Marlowe saw his own time as one in which not one was honored 'but for
>his wealth?'" Surely you are not ascribing Marlowe's thoughts to a
>character he creates-he may have thought it momentarily to put it in the
>mouth of a character he creates, but is it his whole thought or his
>final thought?

Whether it is his or not (I believe it is), what is important is that it
must have had some resonance with his audience in order to account for
the extraordinary popularity of the play.  This is based entirely on
inference, but I don't think anyone would care that wealth was becoming
the end all and be all of existence in Malta, unless they saw some
reflection of the crises taking place in their own culture.  Am I alone
in seeing Shakespeare's Italy as a thinly veiled allegory of Elizabethan
London?

>I don't doubt that Shakespeare or Marlowe saw evils in Christian
>society; however, I really don't understand why you should think that I
>think that "Barabas opposes the valorization of capitalist wealth to
>that of Christian poverty."  I don't understand this sentence at all.

I said that Barabas, like you, believes this, not that you believe that
Barabas believes it. It is you who have placed Christianity and Marxism
at opposite poles of our current dialectic.  The fact that Barabas sets
up a similar dialectic makes his character particularly relevant to our
discussion.

>I think what Barabas is saying is that in this society men are honored for
>their wealth solely and that in such a sick society, he would rather be
>hated as a happy, wealthy man that be pitied as a poor Christian, whom
>he, as a Jew hates for their "malice, falsehood, and excessive pride."
>These are faults in any man, surely, and adopting the Christian religion
>does not make them go away.

Well, for Christians, any pride seems to be excessive and a source of
guilt, but I think Barabas meant an extraordinary quantity of these
faults.  And conversely, of course, refusal to adopt the Christian
religion does not rob one of their antitheses?

>I agree with you that he did not "aspire to be one of Wycliff's poor
>priests" but as Christ says, "in my Father's house, there are many
>mansions."

Right on, and some are better furnished than others.

>Again I do not understand, how "money was the means available" to make
"Elizabethan literati," as you say, >successful.

Actually, you're right.  This is a bit too simple.  The means was
usually patronage.  A poet could not become an aristocrat, but he could
become an aristocrat's personal poet laureate.  In order to do so,
however, he had to hobnob, which meant he needed the proper clothes, and
other accoutrements, like language and a particular kind of learning.
You might find a younger son of a noble family strapped for cash and
lend him some ducats.  Once you were moving in the right circles, the
sky's the limit.  Shakespeare, of course, ended up with the most
aristocratic patron of all.  I don't think of him as someone who pursued
wealth for its own sake, but rather as a man who social status and who
acquired money as a means to that end.

Clifford


about SHAKSPER | current postings | submitted papers | browse SHAKSPER | search SHAKSPER
  
Copyright © 2002, Hardy M. Cook, design by Eric Luhrs. All rights reserved.