The fall of the Gods, or modernity without illusions

Abstract

the religious (better said, God, as if the religious could be reduced to this image) has no place * . The phrase, so frequently uttered by judges in movies, should at least deserve an article by Marc Auge: is religion also one of his trivial non-places? One of the first signs of incipient “modernity”, as suggested by Hegel himself, was the introduction of Judeo-Christian monoteism into ancient European paganism as the principle of subjective individuation. It goes without saying that, in this context, the term “introduction” is not a random choice, for in fact the so-called “West” receives monoteism as if it were “from outside”. On the subject of monoteism: since I am far from being an expert in the matter, I do not know whether much thought has been devoted to the fact that the West as such has not given rise to any of the great religions of the world. All of them –Judaism, Christianity, Islamism, and even Buddhism, “the atheist religion” can be included here- come from what we call the “East”. After all, this may not be a minor detail, specially when one wants to discuss the bond between religion and the social sciences, which indeed have been “invented” in the West. Whatever the case may be, with regard to this field, modernity believed it had surpassed itself –let us say, it had achieved its own Aufhebung, to keep up Hegel’s terminology- by casting away the very monoteism that had been one of its first distinctive features insofar as it stood for a process of abstraction that unified the much more carnal dispersion of the endless “primitive” or ancient gods. The passage from the Many to the One is accompanied by distance from a divinity that is much less willing to meddle in men’s daily disputes. To clear this point further, let it be understood that “casting away” is meant as the fact that, at least in appearance, social life (as well as economic, political, and cultural life) ceases to revolve around religion. It is common knowledge that religion has nothing to do with politics, economy, art, and culture. Undoubtedly, the weight and purpose of institutional cults and their policies concerning decisions made in other spheres (something that any trained newspaper reader can confirm, irrespective of the equally indubitable “last instance decisions”) have not succeeded in naturalizing a more than common sense: religious faith, we were saying, belongs in the private, intimate realm of individual conscience. Moreover, this would be the strictly “modern”, “enlightened” and “progressist” stance which, among other things, lies at the base of irrefutable proposals like the one that urges that State and Church be separated. In other senses, the persistence of religiousness, whether popular or elite, is exceedingly obvious. In truth, religion dies hard. There are many who wonder at the growing power of new sects and cults, while others stand aghast at the part played by the passions involved in religious