History as a Religion and a Political Theology     

            Much of what is called history now is closely akin to and probably developed out of religious mythologies. Religious stories of the past, epic poems, apocalyptic fantasies, chronicles and fables justified monarchical and religious powers,  and state hierarchies. Likewise, today's histories tend to justify corporate or state hierarchies, scientific triumphalism, the 'miracles' of capitalism, Marxism or bureaucratic  and economic technocracy.  Edward Said notes that "it is from the Christian Incarnation that Western realistic literature as we know it emerges". [1] The emphasis on the divinity of the Individual is the origin of churches, nation states and corporations. It is not the ordinary man or woman that is served by these forces.

             Said, in his book Orientalism and elsewhere, traces the service literature rendered to the imperialist and colonial policies of the British, and later the Americans in their brutal drives for Empire.  Writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Joesph Conrad,  Richard Burton and Arthur Rimbaud aided in defining the Oriental as exotic, uncivilized and worthy of conquest and forced submission. In American literature James Fenimore Cooper, in novels such as the Pioneer and the Last of the Mohicans, created similar stereotypes that helped justify the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and the atrocities that this ideology enabled.

            The drive toward a total, encyclopedic, novel, as in Balzac or Joyce, reflects the impetus begun by Dante in the effort to catalogue the world and dissect its meaning. The effort to create a total theory of the universe in science probably arises from the same transcendent will to power through knowledge.  Cultural productions, like Balzac's attempt to write a total novel, are mirrored in similar attempts, by Newton, Einstein and others, to create a total science. The cultural and scientific motivations are in fact identical; both arise from a will to power through knowledge, and both seek to impose an abstract or imagined order upon a resistant world that does not conform. The effort to overlord the 'geography of the imagination' anteceeds and complements  the imperial drive to control the earth and dominate its reaches. Dante's vision of total heaven and total hell, prefigures the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the bombing of Nagasaki.

             Just as novels reflect the drive for empire, biographies and the cult of great men and genius that are implicit in them, are the saints' hagiographies of yesterday. The saints of today become the great inventors, scientists and exceptional individuals that have served 'progress', states or Science. The cult of great men, genius and great ideas has replaced the saints of yesterday. Building intellectual Empires is a concomitant of building continental empires, both proceed from the same impulse and motivations.

            Cyberspace replaces heaven,  international capital, traveling between corporate computers, invisibly determine economies. The internet replaces human interaction; knowledge becomes an international means of furthering the ends of profit and not the rights of people. The hidden  communications of divine intelligence, angels, demons and their like which largely represented the power of the Church to act  as representatives of an abstract power in heaven, are analogous to the machinations of Transnational corporations across the invisible reaches of cyberspace. Fictitious fears of Wall Street investors conveyed across the computer Networks can lower wages in Mexico by one third, as happened recently, and force starvation on many. The origin  of time and the universe is no longer the arena of literate monks like Aquinas, but of physicists, bankers and computer scientists who work for Universities and corporations: time has come to be ruled by profits.

            Somewhere between the 15th and 19th centuries, the Invisible Hand of God was replaced by the Invisible hand of the Market. The fiction of the beneficent Market replaced the fiction of a beneficent god. For instance, one can call the 17th century the Dutch century, if one holds the exercise of power and possession of wealth to be the goal of human life, since certainly the Dutch excelled in this, as the Spanish had in the 16th and the British in the 18th and 19th centuries.  And most histories celebrate the 'miracle' of Dutch  and English trade, science, technology and global expansionism. But only a few historians point out the dark side of these "miracles'. The Dutch made their wealth by creating a virtual slave system in the Baltic, thus gaining control and increasing the labor of the serfs to produce grain, which the Dutch sold to others, especially the Spanish, , who paid for it in silver taken with the blood of  Native Americans working in slave pits like those in Potosi in the vicinity of the conquered Inca.  David Stannard rightly compares the mines of Potosi to Auschwitz:

It is probable that the life expectancy of an Indian engaged in forced labor in a mine or on a Plantation during these early years of Spanish terror in Peru was not much more than three or  four months-- about the same as that of someone working at slave labor in the synthetic rubber manufacturing plant at Auschwitz in the 1940's.[2] 

            Yet historians continue to praise the miracles of the industrial and agricultural revolution almost like dogmas in a catechism. The Dutch took over the slave trade from the Spanish in the 1630's. The money the Dutch made from Spanish atrocities  was then reinvested in the atrocity of the African slave trade: blood upon blood bred Dutch profits; aching bodies growing sick, the whip and the slave ship, corpses thrown overboard, or taxed to death, worked to death, raped or killed by a sword for a cross look.

            The 'miracle' of the Dutch and British economy- and notice should be made of the religious term miracle being applied to what amounted to a system of legalized atrocity-  was the miracle of how  Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market" had replaced the oppressive fiction of the invisible hand of god.

            One could say with Machiavelli, that one should look at the world as 'it is' and not as 'it ought to be': but this is merely complicity in murder. It is necessary to analyze why these atrocities occurred so it will not happen again; so the systems of knowledge/power and engineered atrocities can be understood and avoided. The world  "as it is" in 1700, was a place where the early "miracle" of capitalism had resulted in perhaps 60-100 million Native American deaths and had begun the transport of some 10-15 million slaves to the new world, in the process of which at least twice as many Africans would be killed. This is the background of the capitalist and technological miracle so much celebrated by many historians writing 'neutral' and 'balanced' histories. No doubt, it is quite possible and even common for leaders of states to be complicitious in murder.  No doubt, such leaders and the historians who describe them, believe they are living in the "real" world, the world "as it is". But I prefer to side with Howard Zinn who writes: "for  the United States Machiavellianism dominates foreign policy, but the courage of a small number of dissenters suggests the possibility that someday the larger public will no longer accept that kind of 'realism' ". [3]   Accurate history cannot be a "balanced and neutral"  description of powers. It must be a critique of power and not a bland and self congratulatory endorsement that masquerades as "objective scholarship".

            One can write history as a true believer from many points of view: there have been Catholic histories, Moslem, Nazi and Soviet. But in the U.S. and Western Europe one is much more likely to encounter economic, social or political histories that pretend to some measure of "objectivity" claiming to be 'empirical' or scientific.. The ' objectivity' is quite obvious to those who believe in and profit from the systemic capitalism or qualified Marxism  that rules in these areas.  One need only watch the "History Channel" on T.V., with its endless footage of American military glories, or visit Mount Vernon, or consider what is presented as history in most classrooms, historical novels, museums or the way that history is referred to in common usage to see that history is a form of indoctrination and tacit consent for existing conditions. But if one tries to look at history from outside these accepted categories,  be they  capitalist or Marxist, one risks the danger of becoming an outsider, one of the "other", those whom the West has never recognized as valid in and of themselves, but who can only become valid to the degree of their assimilation to the reigning ideologies of the West. But what if one does not accept the various capitalist versions of history as the development of a  utopia or a global free market, that tends ever upward in an "irreversible economic process" of spiraling growth leading to an attenuated Protestant notion of 'perfection', finality and success ?  What if one does not believe in the religion of capitalism,  which Francis Fukuyama calls the perfection or "the end of history".? Is the final fruit of history the capitalist miracle of the Dalkon Sheild, a device implanted in women that resulted in over 100,000 casualties, as a result of which the company did not pay one cent in damages to the surviving women, and the owners of the company walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars? Or perhaps the perfection of capitalism is the Bhopal incident in India where 10,000 people were killed by Union Carbide corporations and their corporate lawyers are still engineering withholding payments in damages.

            Or what if one does not accept the Marxist notion of history, really a mirror image of  classical liberalism and its contradictory doctrines of finality, utopia and market evolution and growth? Capitalism has become a modern religion and likewise, Chomsky notes that Marxism "belongs to the history of organized religion".  If this is so, then what if one does not accept the notion of  a religious or teleological purpose of history leading to the inevitability of capitalist or Marxist abstractions, hovering somewhere in the twilight future but used to justify oppression in the present?  If one does not wish to  endorse the history of political-economic tyranny and Imperialism in either its Capitalist or Marxist forms that created and still creates the Conquest, not only in the Americas, but in China and the Russian Steppe, one must look at history differently. One enters the realm of outsider histories  and the cross fire of being accused of both hyper intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, when neither are true. But perhaps living outside 'history' understood in the conventional usage of the university and television is not such a bad fate after all.  One is forced to take refuge against the destroyers and the masters of knowledge in the intimately human recesses of withdrawal and alienation. We are one people only where we are weakest: where we have denied the lovers of knowledge and power, and accepted the hardship of conscience and the fragility of being human.

Previous      Table of Contents       Next