Heart of a heartless world: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, March 2023

To be sure, some of the language adopted by Marxists — e.g., heresies, dogma, sects, orthodoxy, schisms — is clearly borrowed from theological disputes. Furthermore, the recantations made by ex-communists at times seems to lend credence to this view.
Ross Laurence Wolfe, The Charnel-House: From Bauhaus to Beinhaus

For the life of me, I don’t know how we managed before the internet.

Of course there was the 1960s underground press scene with hundreds of local papers around the country. I regularly picked up copies of the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and the mother of all alternative newspapers, the Village Voice, from Anne Chicoine’s Books. Anne was an expatriate New Yorker who ran a literary bookshop in a shotgun storefront along Main Street when I lived in Ventura, California. She smoked a meerschaum pipe, spoke with a Manhattan accent, and gave me suggestions for books to read from her wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She kept the alternative papers with the underground comics in the revolving newspaper racks at the front of the store.

“So what’s this?” I asked, pointing to the Credentials of Ministry from the Universal Life Church with her name on it beside the cash register.

“I’m a fully ordained minister,” Anne smirked. “I got my minister’s license from a classified ad in the Freep for ten bucks. You need a wedding, baptism or funeral done I’m your gal. All perfectly legal apparently.”

I got my minister’s certificate soon thereafter. Kirby J. Hensley’s ULC and his pay-to-play ministry licenses were beginning to be tested legally in the early 1970s with a 1974 ruling in “Cramer v Commonwealth” granting the organization a religious tax exemption. By then Hensley had ordained over a million ministers. Whether the UCL’s license constitutes a fraudulent religious affiliation for tax avoidance purposes remains a contested issue. Whether or not a supposed religious organization is due a tax exemption is a matter of “church and state” in that America’s religion has always been the almighty dollar.

ULC’s airy-fairy motto is “Do that which is right,” a blanket ethics that covered Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans, pagans, atheists and whoever else. It’s a vanilla version of Aleister Crowley’s rule for his Abbey of Thélème that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of The Law.” I bounced between atheism and agnosticism in those days so I got the minister’s license on a lark. I was just coming out of a six-month stint as an evangelical Christian after having been a Catholic through my sacramental Confirmation. I would go on to experiment with Unitarianism, Baháʼí-ism and Zen Buddhism, and I continue to have an ongoing interest in spirituality today.

That’s because throughout my life I’ve had what we called in the 1960s “spiritual experiences” produced by contemplative walking, religious conversion, meditative practices, and psychedelic drug usage. I never considered these experiences to be interventions from some spiritual being or realm outside myself. They were all the result of my individual biochemistry, but this isn’t a matter of crude materialist interaction. At base Aristotle’s expression that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” holds true in that, minimally, the accumulated parts need to be augmented by the relationships between those parts. Dialectics emerged in the nineteenth century while gestalt and synergy arose in the twentieth century all to describe the interaction or cooperation between elements of a totality to account for it being greater than the simple sum of those parts.

William James gave a series of lectures to categorize the different spiritual encounters humans have had across the world throughout time which were compiled into the book The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. Two common elements that seem to constitute universalities, are the mystical sensation of transcending the ego and of communion. Every hippie worth their salt in the 1960s had a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap with those text-heavy labels that read like schizophrenic word salad but which always started with the declaration “All-One!” The spiritual sense of communion, of belonging to some greater whole or that “I contain multitudes” as Walt Whitman announced in his poem Song of Myself, is paralleled by what those of us who took psychedelics in the 1960s called “ego death.” The drugs forced a temporary loss of a sense of self which we equated with Eastern religions that promoted negating the individual’s attachment to a separate sense of ego through various spiritual practices. James chose to limit his studies of mystical moments to direct, immediate religious experiences, explicitly excluding any examination of religious theology or institutions. Several of my mystical experiences occurred in the context of churches and other religious organizations that had extremely negative theologies and religious practices.

I encountered plenty of heresy, dogma, sectarianism, orthodoxy and schism during my brief involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ at Ventura Community College in 1970. The friend who converted me, upon expressing frustration at the rabid leftwing bent to my born-again Christianity, dismissed my politics and my friendship by insisting that I forget about all worldly concerns and simply study my bible. When our campus was invaded by a Children of God “commune” whose “hippie” members denounced “The System,” predicted the rise of a totalitarian One World Government under the Anti-Christ’s brutal dictatorship, and preached its revolutionary overthrow by Jesus in the Second Coming, my orthodox Christian friends were understandably confused. They considered themselves frontline shock troops against evil, so when the Hare Krishnas periodically showed up to dance and chant at our school the Christians confronted the saffron-robed dolts as demon-possessed. During one debate when a Krishna pointed to the chest of that same Christian friend to indicate that some fanciful Hindu deity resided in his heart, my friend yelled vehemently back that “There’s no devil in me whatsoever, no sir!” That was the first time I experienced the evangelical tendency to profess a love for Israel and the Jewish people while simultaneously expressing vile anti-Semitic insults against Jews. Christian Zionists consider Jews as both “globalist devils” and an eschatological tripwire for the End Times in which the Second Coming of Jesus restores a fully resurrected Israel to its rightful place as a religious and cultural beacon in the community of nations. It’s the metaphor of “Christ’s long suffering bride,” both abused and redeemed.

After community college, I eventually started reading Karl Marx, who wrote that:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

This tempered, dialectical understanding of human faith runs counter to the actual history of religion—the intolerance, oppression, sectarianism, mayhem, torture, slaughter, mass murder, and warfare that is SOP for religion. Doris Lessing made a similarly balanced evaluation of Marxism when she wrote:

I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects and creeds. But it was an attempt.

Religion is far and away the more destructive ideology when compared to Marxism. There are no “holy wars” between branches of socialism unlike the Catholic/Protestant or the Christian/Moslem bloodbaths that stain history and the present. I don’t accept the capitalist insult that socialism is an odious form of religion (Ludwig von Mises) or the bourgeois atheist’s claim that Christianity or Judaism are fundamentally socialistic in nature (Ayn Rand). Instead I’ll briefly touch on Marxism’s eschatological tendency per Raymond Aron to see the working class as humanity’s “collective savior… that is, the class elected through suffering for the redemption of humanity.” “One of the most common charges leveled at Marxists is that, for all their atheistic pretensions, they retain a quasi-religious faith in the revolutionary dispensation of working class dictatorship,” according to Ross Laurence Wolfe in his salient essay “Demonology of the working class”. “’It’s become an almost compulsory figure of speech to refer to Marxism as a Church,’ observed the French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1951. […] Socialism, however, is not about worshiping but rather abolishing the worker.”

The problems of Marxist “theology” aside, my time in various socialist organizations and movements acquainted me with a number of similar “spiritual” moments. There are analogous experiences of egolessness, communion, and community to be had on the Left compared with religion. Referring again to Wolfe’s brilliant essay, I reveled in the “mad rush” of direct action and the “demonic character” of revolution. Certainly the “Faustian dimension of Marxist thought”—his exaltation of the proletariat as “not just Promethean but Luciferian”—appealed to me viscerally. Wolfe’s lengthy discussion of Marxism’s deification of the proletariat versus the need to abolish the working class is well worth reading in full.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Introduction” by Karl Marx (1844)
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman (1855)
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
The Golden Notebook, “Introduction” by Doris Lessing (1971)
“Demonology of the working class” by Ross Laurence Wolfe, The Charnel-House: From Bauhaus to Beinhaus (2016)

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By any other name: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, August 2021

I picked up an archaic paper flyer pinned to an obsolete cork board in the now-defunct Market Street branch of FLAX Art Supplies. The handbill advertised a web designer and mobile app developer—Daniel Goodwyn—who offered to teach virtually any platform or software. I wanted to learn social media to prepare for self-publishing my novel 1% Free, so I called. He was cheap. We arranged to meet at Philz Coffee on 24th Street.

“I only drink Philz coffee,” Daniel said.

We met six or seven times at the end of 2015, beginning of 2016. Daniel was an evangelical Christian favorable to fundamentalism, but he wore his religious beliefs close to the vest. He didn’t proselytize. Instead, he would produce his worn King James Bible from his backpack before starting each lesson. I pulled out my Handbook of Denominations by Mead, Hill and Atwood our third meeting and we were off discussing Christianity between social media tutoring. We talked dispensationalism, cessationism, and biblical inerrancy. He’d attended 24/7 worship and prayer events, and would soon do web design for the messianic Jews for Jesus organization.

Boutique capitalism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2021

I’d gotten high on marijuana, hashish, LSD, MDA, cocaine, amphetamine, barbiturates, heroin, jimson weed, nitrous oxide, peyote, mescaline and psilocybin by 1972 living in Ventura, California. But I still hadn’t gotten drunk. I didn’t start drinking alcohol with any frequency until late 1974, over a year after I turned 21 and had already moved to Santa Cruz to attend UCSC. But in the spring of 1972 I didn’t like booze. I didn’t like people who drank instead of getting stoned, and I hated loud bar scenes. So I was jealous and miffed when a friend regaled me with the news that “Hey, I was drinking at John’s At The Beach and John Lennon just showed up, jumped on stage and played ‘Norwegian Wood’.” And I was seriously annoyed to learn that Lennon returned two days later to play another brief set, this time backed by a few local musicians.

Rob Miller, Tau Cross and the spiritualism of fools: “What’s Left?” August 2019 (MRR #435)

Music in the 60s tended to be godawful serious. The folk protest music was self-righteous and the rock and roll was full of itself. I’ve had a decent sense of humor about most things, including music, and thanks to my rather broadminded parents I was introduced early to Spike Jones and Tom Lehrer. When I transitioned to all that hippie music I appreciated the satire of Phil Ochs and The Smothers Brothers and the sarcasm of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and of course Captain Beefheart. And I enjoyed the music of various outliers, the surreal humor of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (“Yeah! Digging General de Gaulle on accordion./Rather wild, General!/Thank you, sir.”) and the playful Americana of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. When I heard that vocalist and guitarist Jim Kweskin had joined the Lyman Family, the LSD cult of banjo and harmonica player Mel Lyman, I was taken aback.

I mean, the 60s counterculture was full of cults centered around charismatic asshole men, from Charles Manson’s Family to the Process Church, Steve Gaskin’s The Farm, and David Berg’s Children of God. The New Left was little better, spawning the likes of Lyndon LaRouche, Donald DeFreeze’s Symbionese Liberation Army, Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, and Marlene Dixon’s Democratic Workers Party, one of the rare political cults lead by a woman. And let’s mention Synanon, the Élan School and Scientology simply in passing. For all the talk about spiritual or political liberation back in the day, the first kneejerk response by people seeking their own liberation was often to join an authoritarian mind-control cult. So no, I wasn’t really surprised that Kweskin was part of the Fort Hill Community in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. Mel Lyman had been called the East Coast Charles Manson by Rolling Stone in 1971. I was seriously disappointed however, and I just couldn’t listen to his music anymore.

So I get it.

I’m against it!: “What’s Left?” January 2019, MRR #428

I’m against it.

Groucho Marx as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff
“I’m Against It,” Horse Feathers

I’m against it.

The Ramones, “I’m Against It,” Road to Ruin

I’m against it.

Capitalism that is. I’m against capitalism because it prioritizes profit over human need, exploits workers, engenders economic instability through overproduction and underconsumption, promotes social inequalities, degrades human community, destroys the environment, and encourages short term thinking at the expense of longterm planning. There is a vastly better alternative to capitalism in the form of socialism.

Religion Reconsidered: “What’s Left?” March 2008, MRR #298

One of my many contradictions, from a Marxist perspective, is that I’m a wimpy, waffling agnostic, not a hardcore, commie atheist. The reason I’m an agnostic instead of an atheist has nothing to do with finding flaws in atheism’s arguments against the existence of God, or with finding redeeming features in the horror show that is religion. I’m undecided about whether or not God exists because, throughout my life, I’ve had personal experiences that might be described as spiritual, mystical, even religious.

I’ve had these experiences since I was a kid, long before the psychedelic drug use of my hippie days. A momentary, overwhelming sensation that I was a part of everything, and that everything was a part of me. A fleeting, all pervasive feeling that I had suddenly risen high above this mundane, everyday existence. The inexplicable awareness that I had briefly stumbled upon some greater reality, the true, scintillating reality behind this dingy, decaying façade that was life. I’ve had these experiences well after I stopped doing psychedelics. As for the psychedelics-acid, mescaline, psilocybin-they produced quasi-mystical experiences forcefully driven, selectively amplified, and seriously distorted by the chemicals in question.

I was loosely raised Catholic, though I don’t associate my childhood spiritual incidents with Roman Catholicism. My parents wanted me to get the sacraments up to Confirmation, just in case the Big Guy was Catholic. I was on my own after that, and I never bothered to go back to church. I’ve never tried to cultivate these mystical moments by pursuing a spiritual practice or, Marx forbid, an organized religion either. I simply experienced them, marveling at many of them, enduring the rest, and getting something out of them all. Of course, I’ve come to my own understanding of what Tom Wolfe, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, referred to as the kairos, the how and why and what-for of this “time out of time,” this “most propitious moment.”

The how is simple enough. The actual experience, no doubt, is biochemically based, a natural, internal analog to the psychedelic drugs I experimented with during the early 1970s. That said, establishing such a cause-and-effect doesn’t reduce the spiritual event to a biochemical phantom, nor does it relegate the whole episode to some mechanical, materially determined process. To grasp why this is the case, we need to delve into a little bit of Marxism, in particular, Marx’s notion of dialectical materialism.

For Marx, the economic base of society gives rise to a superstructure comprised of society’s legal and political structures, as well as of the “higher ideologies of the art, religion and philosophy of bourgeois society,” as Karl Korsch described it in Marxism and Philosophy. Yet, just because the social superstructure is a product of the economic base does not make it any less real. “[Marx and Engels] always treated ideologies-including philosophy-as concrete realities and not as empty fantasies.” “[I]t is essential for modern dialectical materialism to grasp philosophies and other ideological systems in theory as realities, and to treat them in practice as such.” What’s more, society’s political and ideological superstructure achieves a measure of autonomy to act back upon the economic base to change it, creating a dialectical relationship between the two that defines “bourgeois society as a totality.” Or as Marx himself put it in the Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Theory itself becomes a material force once it takes hold on the masses. Theory is capable of taking hold on the masses … once it becomes radical.”

This clearly distinguishes dialectical materialism from the crude materialism of Newtonian science, in which one billiard ball hits another in a simple linear chain of causality. I’d argue that dialectical materialism is much more akin to the systems and information theories pioneered by Gregory Bateson in the areas of psychology, biology and ecology. But how does dialectical materialism relate to my discussion of personal spiritual experiences?

In contending that mystical moments have a biochemical basis, similar to the endorphin high produced by vigorous exercise, I’m not refuting the reality of these events. No doubt, all individual thought and feeling can be traced back to biochemistry, yet it cannot be denied that these thoughts and feelings frequently have material effects and consequences in that we act on them. In the same way, human interest in and pursuit of spiritual experience spurs activities intended to reproduce and refine those experiences, generating on the one hand spiritual practices like yoga, meditation, chanting, and ecstatic dancing, and on the other hand the practices, institutions and ideologies of organized religion.

This isn’t to repudiate the fact that society’s economic base leaves profound marks on spiritual practice and organized religion, only to assert that the initial impulse for both resides elsewhere. Nor would I be surprised to learn that millennia of spiritual and religious activity, in turn, have acted upon this biochemical substrate to distill and shape it, and that the two have coevolved over time. The great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, like Notre Dame or Chartre, can be appreciated, in part, as finely tuned machinery incorporating a variety of spiritual technologies designed to induce mystical experiences in the participating individuals. While the triggers for spiritual episodes are often social and cultural then, their impetus is transhistorical, imbedded in that problematic realm known as human nature. The instances of spontaneous, unbidden spiritual awakening, some resulting in the founding of entirely new religions, bear this out. The capacity for mystical experience seems to be hardwired to some degree into most of us, perhaps as a peculiar expression of the wider human pursuit of altered states through drug use, artistic endeavor, SM, asceticism, exercise and sport. The question is, why? What function does it serve?

Marx posited a kind of human nature in asserting that we are social beings, a concept covered by the hotly debated term species being. You can be sure that human sociality and spirituality are keenly related within the context of species being. That there is overlap between spirituality, sexuality and power also goes without saying. The spiritual experience is often described as fiery, capable of reducing all that is false to ash. In its crucible is forged the certainty of individual belief and the unity so necessary for social cohesion. I’m not sure what Marx thought about individual spiritual practice, but his views on the rituals, churches, traditions, theologies and holy wars of organized religion are well known:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.

Gotta love those dialectics. That religion in bourgeois society serves to delude, comfort and pacify the masses doesn’t tell us much more about the function of the more elemental mystical moment however. Aside from acting as a kind of experiential superglue for personal belief and social unity, there’s another aspect to spiritual episodes that’s worth discussing.

First, let’s talk a little bit about consciousness. Human consciousness arises from a very small number of neural circuits in the brain that monitor the rest of the mind, and the body. Given that consciousness relies on a small percentage of gray matter to function, it cannot possibly be all encompassing, and the scope of human awareness is thus severely limited. With regard to sensory perception, for instance, we are flooded with sensory information all the time, yet our conscious mind is only aware of a small fraction of that information. As an example, our clothing is in constant contact with the skin under it, stimulating our sense of touch over a wide area of our body. We’re not conscious of everywhere our clothing touches our skin though. We feel our clothes only in certain places, particularly when they impinge or restrict us. Therefore, the sensory input from the rest of our skin in contact with our clothes is filtered out of our awareness. Aside from purely biological filters, there are also cultural, social and personal filters that further restrict this torrential sensory flow.

We receive, and process, vast amounts of sensory data on many levels other than the conscious. Aldous Huxley proposed, in The Doors of Perception, that psychedelic drugs temporarily knock out these filters so that we experience heightened sensory impressions, even forms of synesthesia. Whether or not this is the case, the overwhelming influx of sense perception that comes in under the radar of consciousness does have other interesting side effects.

Sometimes, bits and pieces of this unconscious sense data percolate up into an individual’s awareness. The result is a hunch, an intuitive feeling, which cannot be pinned down to anything obvious. When patterns begin to emerge through this process, something quite innocuous can trigger a sudden, epiphanal moment. Then we say “everything fell into place,” “the scales fell from my eyes,” “all was revealed,” and “I saw things as they truly were.”

I’m intentionally using quasi-religious phrasing here in anticipation of my next point. There is a certain category of spiritual experience known as “the road to Damascus” moment, when the mystical episode bowls over the individual and literally changes his or her life. Paul, of the New Testament, had a profound religious awakening on his way to Damascus, and went from being a Jewish persecutor of Christians to a Christian believer. Paul’s personal sense of his place in the scheme of things radically shifted in an instant. Perhaps this kind of spiritual experience is like a hunch on steroids.

What I’m postulating is that certain life-changing mystical incidents act on the deepest levels of human perception, our sense of ourselves and of our place in the universe. None of my spiritual experiences were ever that profound, though I always learned something from them. That all such spiritual moments come permeated with a sense of the supernatural Other, what we interpret as the sacred and the divine and call God, is what gives me pause. Ultimately, it’s why I can’t declare myself an atheist.

BBC-TV did a movie, Longford, about the English aristocrat and prison reformer who became involved with one of Britain’s most notorious criminals, child-killer Myra Hindley. Hindley gets one of the film’s better lines, the implications of which would fill another column. I’ll close on the character Myra’s words. “Evil can be a spiritual experience too.”