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The Politics at God's Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization
Argues that the concept of God is vanishing, causing a widespread erosion of moral and social values, and calls for a union between faith and anti-faith to create a society in which people can discover new values
- GenresPhilosophy
308 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1983
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About the author
Michael Harrington
104 books72 followersEdward Michael Harrington was an American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, professor of political science, and radio commentator.
Early life
Harrington was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended St. Louis University High School, College of the Holy Cross, University of Chicago (MA in English Literature), and Yale Law School. As a young man, he was interested in both leftwing politics and Catholicism. Fittingly, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, a pacifist group that advocated a radical interpretation of the Gospel. Above all else, Harrington was an intellectual. He loved arguing about culture and politics, preferably over beer, and his Jesuit education made him a fine debater and rhetorician. Harrington was an editor of The Catholic Worker from 1951 to 1953. However, Harrington became disillusioned with religion and, although he would always retain a certain affection for Catholic culture, he ultimately became an atheist.
Becoming a socialist
This estrangement from religion was accompanied by a growing interest in Marxism and a drift toward secular socialism. After leaving The Catholic Worker Harrington became a member of the Independent Socialist League, a small organization associated with the former Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman. Harrington and Shachtman believed that socialism, the promise of a just and fully democratic society, could not be realized under authoritarian Communism and they were both fiercely critical of the "bureaucratic collectivist" states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
Harrington became a member of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party when the SP agreed to absorb Shachtman's organization. Harrington backed the Shachtmanite realignment strategy of working within the Democratic Party rather than running candidates on a Socialist ticket.
Socialist leader
During this period Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States, a book that had an impact on the Kennedy administration, and on Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent War on Poverty. Harrington became a widely read intellectual and political writer. He would frequently debate noted conservatives but would also clash with the younger radicals in the New Left movements. He was present at the 1962 SDS conference that led to the creation of the Port Huron Statement, where he argued that the final draft was insufficiently anti-Communist. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. referred to Harrington as the "only responsible radical" in America, a somewhat dubious distinction among those on the political left. His high profile landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.
By early 1970s Shachtman's anti-Communism had become a hawkish Cold War liberalism. Shachtman and the governing faction of the Socialist Party effectively supported the Vietnam War and changed the organization's name to Social Democrats, USA. In protest Harrington led a number of Norman Thomas-era Socialists, younger activists and ex-Shachtmanites into the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. A smaller faction associated with peace activist David McReynolds formed the Socialist Party USA.
In the early 1980s The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged with the New American Movement, an organization of New Left veterans, forming Democratic Socialists of America. This organization remains the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International, which includes socialist parties as diverse as the Swedish and German Social Democrats, Nicaragua's FSLN, and the British Labour Party.
Academician and public intellectual
Harrington was appointed a professor of political science at Queens College in 1972 and was designated a distinguished professor in 1988. During the 1980s he contributed commentaries to National Public Radio. Harrington died in 1989 of cancer. He was the most well-known socialist in the United States during his lifetime.
Early life
Harrington was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended St. Louis University High School, College of the Holy Cross, University of Chicago (MA in English Literature), and Yale Law School. As a young man, he was interested in both leftwing politics and Catholicism. Fittingly, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, a pacifist group that advocated a radical interpretation of the Gospel. Above all else, Harrington was an intellectual. He loved arguing about culture and politics, preferably over beer, and his Jesuit education made him a fine debater and rhetorician. Harrington was an editor of The Catholic Worker from 1951 to 1953. However, Harrington became disillusioned with religion and, although he would always retain a certain affection for Catholic culture, he ultimately became an atheist.
Becoming a socialist
This estrangement from religion was accompanied by a growing interest in Marxism and a drift toward secular socialism. After leaving The Catholic Worker Harrington became a member of the Independent Socialist League, a small organization associated with the former Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman. Harrington and Shachtman believed that socialism, the promise of a just and fully democratic society, could not be realized under authoritarian Communism and they were both fiercely critical of the "bureaucratic collectivist" states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
Harrington became a member of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party when the SP agreed to absorb Shachtman's organization. Harrington backed the Shachtmanite realignment strategy of working within the Democratic Party rather than running candidates on a Socialist ticket.
Socialist leader
During this period Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States, a book that had an impact on the Kennedy administration, and on Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent War on Poverty. Harrington became a widely read intellectual and political writer. He would frequently debate noted conservatives but would also clash with the younger radicals in the New Left movements. He was present at the 1962 SDS conference that led to the creation of the Port Huron Statement, where he argued that the final draft was insufficiently anti-Communist. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. referred to Harrington as the "only responsible radical" in America, a somewhat dubious distinction among those on the political left. His high profile landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.
By early 1970s Shachtman's anti-Communism had become a hawkish Cold War liberalism. Shachtman and the governing faction of the Socialist Party effectively supported the Vietnam War and changed the organization's name to Social Democrats, USA. In protest Harrington led a number of Norman Thomas-era Socialists, younger activists and ex-Shachtmanites into the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. A smaller faction associated with peace activist David McReynolds formed the Socialist Party USA.
In the early 1980s The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged with the New American Movement, an organization of New Left veterans, forming Democratic Socialists of America. This organization remains the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International, which includes socialist parties as diverse as the Swedish and German Social Democrats, Nicaragua's FSLN, and the British Labour Party.
Academician and public intellectual
Harrington was appointed a professor of political science at Queens College in 1972 and was designated a distinguished professor in 1988. During the 1980s he contributed commentaries to National Public Radio. Harrington died in 1989 of cancer. He was the most well-known socialist in the United States during his lifetime.
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August 13, 2017
The False – and Empty – Deity of Capitalism
By Greg Cusack
August 13, 2017
In reading Michael Harrington’s The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization, I remembered a conversation I had once had with a beloved nephew in which he had told me that he “no longer believed in God.”
There had been a hint of uneasiness in his voice when he had said this, perhaps because he was uncertain as to how his Irish-Catholic uncle – who had once seriously considered entering the seminary in order to study for the priesthood – might react. But I was neither upset nor surprised, for I had come to understand that all of us must, as a necessary condition of passage to adulthood, thoughtfully reexamine the most basic beliefs that formed us in our childhood.
I remember cautioning him, though, that he needed “to be careful about what you do come to believe in,” for it is not just religion to which humans give unquestioning belief. It seems that it is part of our biological nature to search for explanations of “why and how things work” and then, once we believe we have found them, to accept those answers without further questioning.
In truth, we all believe in something by which we order our lives and govern our behavior, even if it is only in ourselves.
In The Politics at God’s Funeral Harrington, written over 35 years ago, America’s pre-eminent democratic socialist explored the consequences of the spreading loss of faith in the “omnipotent God” whose existence was once thought to be the origin of all order in created things. It is Harrington’s thesis that belief in this deity – which had for millennia formed the basis for ecclesial, social, and political hierarchical authority – had been “relativized by the new scientific, historical, sociological and anthropological consciousness of the nineteenth century.”
While not immediately apparent at the time, the intellectual ferment spawned by the advent of the scientific method in the 17th century, and the emergence of faith in human reason with the Enlightenment of the 18th century, previously unshakable authority structures began to totter. For, if God was really more likely the product of myth and doctrine than “fact,” then also the “divinely established” rights of kings and nobles were, in fact, of fallible human – and not divine – origin.
And, most disturbing of all, if one could no longer have faith in “God,” then in what, if anything, could humans have faith?
For a brief period in the 18th century, it seemed that the clarifying power of human reason alone might merit humanity’s faith; free of the false “knowledge” of myth and doctrine, clear-thinking men and women would welcome decisions flowing from the calm deliberation of scientifically determined facts!
The horrific convulsions of the French Revolution, however, shattered this illusory power of serene reason, a savage reminder that humans are also subject to the deep well of unreason that is also an intimate part of human nature.
The 19th century in the West was a time of multilayered discontents and searching for meaning. Some came to believe that a more just and equitable society could be achieved only by overthrowing the existing order, while others embraced various causes or ideologies whose logical paths seemed to promise redemption from civil disorder and suffering. Most ominously, however, were those who transferred their faith to the newly empowered “nation-state,” believing that only it could be the ultimate source and instrument of enduring order.
This was the fearful fulfillment of the unheeded warnings of Nietzsche and other prescient 19th century thinkers who understood that the loss of faith in “God” would lead to the transformation of the secular institutions of modern life – such as capitalism, militarism, and nationalism – into forces to which religious-like devotion would lead to many savage, unforeseen outcomes, including “wars of a kind that have never happened on earth.”
The 20th century, with its numerous wars and genocides occasioned by self-proclaimed “men of destiny,” grimly illustrated the consequence of such misplaced faith.
Although conservatives have long warned – especially since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal – that an over-reliance on “the state” was sapping America’s strength, most citizens of the United States have been blind to how the US has long embraced another pernicious form of substitute religion: faith in capitalism’s “unfettered market” which, in fact, has influenced so much of US history.
First, American foreign policy from the very beginning has been guided by the twin goals of seeking out new markets while protecting access to existing ones. America’s spokespersons have typically dressed this fact with noble words, such as the Open Door policy towards trade with China that guided American policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
While every nation is naturally concerned about maintaining an economy sufficient to feed, clothe and house its people, the United States has cloaked its economic policies with its self-conceived mission of advancing and protecting democracy and freedom around the world, making it very difficult to discern where pure economic self-interest ends and ideological “mission” begins.
Second, the “freedom” sought by America’s Founders has been – intentionally by some – severely undermined by this economic obsession. In fact, the concept of freedom has two components:
• First, the negative function of protecting citizens from government intrusion into one’s personal affairs or unwarranted government regulation of business, and,
• Second, the positive function of liberating individuals from those constraints that would limit their right to attain fullness of life, such as adequate health care, good education, and worthwhile employment offering fair wages.
For the past half-century, the conservative ascendency in the United States has been hammering home the message that true freedom means primarily (or only) freedom from government in all of its forms. While framed as vigilance towards protecting individuals from intrusion by an overly active and inimical “government,” it is actually a mantra designed to help the wealthy elite and their corporate allies dodge their responsibilities toward the common good of both the nation and the global community while they continue to reap an ever-greater share of wealth.
On the other hand, freedom to become is the stuff of which dreams are made; it moves people to strive for a more just and equitable society, a true community of the many, helping us to conceive of the kind of country we would like to live in rather than accepting the “way things are” as the inevitable outcome of the mysterious workings of the semi-deified “market.”
As Harrington warned, the “de facto atheism [of] late capitalism society” is “a thoughtless, normless, selfish, hedonistic individualism,” a logical outcome of placing “faith” in an economic system that callously determine the price of everything while, in fact, knowing the value of nothing.
Harrington, though calling himself an atheist, stresses the necessity for the creation of a new kind of transcendence, “a concern for values as such, for a vision of individual and social meaningfulness” that alone can provide us with the spirit and energy to build up our national and international communities towards life-sustaining goals rather than, as present, with life-depleting ones.
Although he does not put it this way, I personally believe that what is undeniably sacred is the world we live in and the fleeting existence each of us has. These are what we must cherish and hold “holy,” not the human created doctrines that allow us to treat some as being less equal than others.
While the old “God” of the Middle Ages may be “dead,” the God of Life – in all his/her forms – lives amongst us, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harrington proposes a “new consensus” for the transcendental, the ingredients of which would be:
First, “no law is binding unless the people have had an effective participation in its formulation.”
Second, “It is common experience which alone can provide the basis for common values. Therefore, communitarianism is an essential component, in both theory and practice, of the new transcendental.”
“Third, there must be an expansion of moral motivation based on solidarity. One does not move quickly from a society which has spent four hundred years exalting greed and gain to one in which altruistic reasons for action become dominant. But capitalism is now the chief source of the mindless, de facto atheism which is the enemy of both atheistic humanism and religious faith in the West.”
“Fourth, even if I imagine this consensus as arising in the West, it must be universal…. Our economics, science and technology long ago shattered national and regional borders. Our consciousness, as usual, lags well behind, and so do our politics.”
By Greg Cusack
August 13, 2017
In reading Michael Harrington’s The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization, I remembered a conversation I had once had with a beloved nephew in which he had told me that he “no longer believed in God.”
There had been a hint of uneasiness in his voice when he had said this, perhaps because he was uncertain as to how his Irish-Catholic uncle – who had once seriously considered entering the seminary in order to study for the priesthood – might react. But I was neither upset nor surprised, for I had come to understand that all of us must, as a necessary condition of passage to adulthood, thoughtfully reexamine the most basic beliefs that formed us in our childhood.
I remember cautioning him, though, that he needed “to be careful about what you do come to believe in,” for it is not just religion to which humans give unquestioning belief. It seems that it is part of our biological nature to search for explanations of “why and how things work” and then, once we believe we have found them, to accept those answers without further questioning.
In truth, we all believe in something by which we order our lives and govern our behavior, even if it is only in ourselves.
In The Politics at God’s Funeral Harrington, written over 35 years ago, America’s pre-eminent democratic socialist explored the consequences of the spreading loss of faith in the “omnipotent God” whose existence was once thought to be the origin of all order in created things. It is Harrington’s thesis that belief in this deity – which had for millennia formed the basis for ecclesial, social, and political hierarchical authority – had been “relativized by the new scientific, historical, sociological and anthropological consciousness of the nineteenth century.”
While not immediately apparent at the time, the intellectual ferment spawned by the advent of the scientific method in the 17th century, and the emergence of faith in human reason with the Enlightenment of the 18th century, previously unshakable authority structures began to totter. For, if God was really more likely the product of myth and doctrine than “fact,” then also the “divinely established” rights of kings and nobles were, in fact, of fallible human – and not divine – origin.
And, most disturbing of all, if one could no longer have faith in “God,” then in what, if anything, could humans have faith?
For a brief period in the 18th century, it seemed that the clarifying power of human reason alone might merit humanity’s faith; free of the false “knowledge” of myth and doctrine, clear-thinking men and women would welcome decisions flowing from the calm deliberation of scientifically determined facts!
The horrific convulsions of the French Revolution, however, shattered this illusory power of serene reason, a savage reminder that humans are also subject to the deep well of unreason that is also an intimate part of human nature.
The 19th century in the West was a time of multilayered discontents and searching for meaning. Some came to believe that a more just and equitable society could be achieved only by overthrowing the existing order, while others embraced various causes or ideologies whose logical paths seemed to promise redemption from civil disorder and suffering. Most ominously, however, were those who transferred their faith to the newly empowered “nation-state,” believing that only it could be the ultimate source and instrument of enduring order.
This was the fearful fulfillment of the unheeded warnings of Nietzsche and other prescient 19th century thinkers who understood that the loss of faith in “God” would lead to the transformation of the secular institutions of modern life – such as capitalism, militarism, and nationalism – into forces to which religious-like devotion would lead to many savage, unforeseen outcomes, including “wars of a kind that have never happened on earth.”
The 20th century, with its numerous wars and genocides occasioned by self-proclaimed “men of destiny,” grimly illustrated the consequence of such misplaced faith.
Although conservatives have long warned – especially since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal – that an over-reliance on “the state” was sapping America’s strength, most citizens of the United States have been blind to how the US has long embraced another pernicious form of substitute religion: faith in capitalism’s “unfettered market” which, in fact, has influenced so much of US history.
First, American foreign policy from the very beginning has been guided by the twin goals of seeking out new markets while protecting access to existing ones. America’s spokespersons have typically dressed this fact with noble words, such as the Open Door policy towards trade with China that guided American policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
While every nation is naturally concerned about maintaining an economy sufficient to feed, clothe and house its people, the United States has cloaked its economic policies with its self-conceived mission of advancing and protecting democracy and freedom around the world, making it very difficult to discern where pure economic self-interest ends and ideological “mission” begins.
Second, the “freedom” sought by America’s Founders has been – intentionally by some – severely undermined by this economic obsession. In fact, the concept of freedom has two components:
• First, the negative function of protecting citizens from government intrusion into one’s personal affairs or unwarranted government regulation of business, and,
• Second, the positive function of liberating individuals from those constraints that would limit their right to attain fullness of life, such as adequate health care, good education, and worthwhile employment offering fair wages.
For the past half-century, the conservative ascendency in the United States has been hammering home the message that true freedom means primarily (or only) freedom from government in all of its forms. While framed as vigilance towards protecting individuals from intrusion by an overly active and inimical “government,” it is actually a mantra designed to help the wealthy elite and their corporate allies dodge their responsibilities toward the common good of both the nation and the global community while they continue to reap an ever-greater share of wealth.
On the other hand, freedom to become is the stuff of which dreams are made; it moves people to strive for a more just and equitable society, a true community of the many, helping us to conceive of the kind of country we would like to live in rather than accepting the “way things are” as the inevitable outcome of the mysterious workings of the semi-deified “market.”
As Harrington warned, the “de facto atheism [of] late capitalism society” is “a thoughtless, normless, selfish, hedonistic individualism,” a logical outcome of placing “faith” in an economic system that callously determine the price of everything while, in fact, knowing the value of nothing.
Harrington, though calling himself an atheist, stresses the necessity for the creation of a new kind of transcendence, “a concern for values as such, for a vision of individual and social meaningfulness” that alone can provide us with the spirit and energy to build up our national and international communities towards life-sustaining goals rather than, as present, with life-depleting ones.
Although he does not put it this way, I personally believe that what is undeniably sacred is the world we live in and the fleeting existence each of us has. These are what we must cherish and hold “holy,” not the human created doctrines that allow us to treat some as being less equal than others.
While the old “God” of the Middle Ages may be “dead,” the God of Life – in all his/her forms – lives amongst us, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harrington proposes a “new consensus” for the transcendental, the ingredients of which would be:
First, “no law is binding unless the people have had an effective participation in its formulation.”
Second, “It is common experience which alone can provide the basis for common values. Therefore, communitarianism is an essential component, in both theory and practice, of the new transcendental.”
“Third, there must be an expansion of moral motivation based on solidarity. One does not move quickly from a society which has spent four hundred years exalting greed and gain to one in which altruistic reasons for action become dominant. But capitalism is now the chief source of the mindless, de facto atheism which is the enemy of both atheistic humanism and religious faith in the West.”
“Fourth, even if I imagine this consensus as arising in the West, it must be universal…. Our economics, science and technology long ago shattered national and regional borders. Our consciousness, as usual, lags well behind, and so do our politics.”
October 21, 2009
Some of the most interesting commentary, in short bursts anyhow, on Marx and religion that I've come across in a long time. Harrington looks at Marx's
On the Jewish Question
specifically for this, which apparently I will now have to read. In Harrington's reading, which I think follows Marx's logic pretty closely, Marx argues that modern (i.e., late 19th-century) European society has become practically agnostic while simultaneously enshrining a religious and theological dynamic in its most fundamental structure: the distinction between individuals as citizens of the state, in which everyone is equal before the law, on the one hand; and individuals as private participants in civil and economic life, where inequality (because of differences in wealth and therefore power) is the norm. This, Harrington says, plays for Marx the very same role as the Christian distinction between a this-worldly life of imperfection and suffering contrasted to a life of perfect fulfillment in the hereafter. Any system which justifies injustice by postulating a kind of ideal justice somewhere else is, in Harrington's reading of Marx, fundamentally Christian. The situation of the Jewish industrialist in European society exemplifies this, as he is hampered by legal disabilities in the public sphere but privately wields great power due to his wealth; his power, thus, is necessarily antisocial in nature since it emerges from the disjunction between the official ideals of justice and the practical realities of economic necessity. I think. Anyhow, that's what I'm getting so far. I'll have to reread this.
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