From Sacred/Profane to Free/Unfree

The Religious Roots of Secularism and Disenchantment

In the ancient world, the distinction between “sacred” and “profane” was primary. Sacred things were useless, profane things were useful. Sacred things were set aside, profane things were mobilized.

Giorgio Agamben argues that sacredness and profanity do not inhere in objects as stable states, but are rather vectors of movement; the sacred and the profane are verbs, not nouns. You sanctify or you profane. But nothing is neutral. Either you are desecrating, by removing the sacred from its apartness, or you are sanctifying by rendering a mundane thing inoperative.

It strikes me that the secular world is characterized not simply by a denial of the holy, but also by a denial of the profane, since you can’t have one without the other. Neutrality, which is the effect of disenchantment, means that you can neither desecrate nor elevate. All attempts to do so are mere gestures, nostalgic nods to a time when the stakes were much higher. So, the modern pantheists from Spinoza to Ginsberg are wrong that everything is holy just as the modern atheists from Nietzsche to Marx are wrong that everything is profane—the truth is that the modern rational world knows neither sanctification nor profanation.

Pop culture relishes the “low,” be it curse words, the pornographic, potty humor—but we should regard this phenomenon not as profanity, which is a religious mode, but as a failed attempt to shock in a world that knows no shame. The “lower” the culture gets, the more explicit the assault on the senses, the more we can see it as a kind of grasping for holiness, in reverse—an unconscious attempt to summon God by way of the devil, much as Mikhail Bulgakov did with his Master and Margarita.

What replaces the sacred/profane divide in the modern world?

Arguably, the distinction between freedom and unfreedom. Existentialist philosophy, which has trickled into mass culture by way of the hippie movement of the ‘60s has turned my ability to do whatever I want into a kind of sanctity. Meanwhile, any constraint on my freedom is a kind of profanity, at least to me. Unfortunately, political life requires balancing the trade-off between my freedom and yours when they conflict, but that is no argument against the critical point of the Zeitgeist. To be unfree is to be profane.

In my drive-by anthropological analysis, this explains the effectively neo-religious reaction that people have to constraints on their self-perceived liberties; economic self-interest alone cannot explain it. But once you see freedom as a kind of religious symbol it makes sense. Liberalism is, in a way, a religion.

Martin Hägglund argues in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom that capitalism does not offer us freedom because it constrains our time and puts practical pressure on what we can actually value, especially those of us who have to work to survive (rather than work to self-express some “calling”). In effect, he argues, Marx is right o see modern employment as a violation of our existential freedom. I don’t find this argument convincing, but I do think it well articulates the notion that secularism remains a faithful and spiritual endeavor, albeit one that has turned my ability to do what I love into an ersatz holiness. Just as we can’t prove or disprove ancient religion, we can’t disprove or prove Hägglund’s creed, but that is what it is, a creed.

Ironically, and often without knowing it, the most fervent critics of “the tradition” remain traditionalists.

Some question for moderns, especially religious moderns, is it possible to hold onto the sacred/profane distinction without giving up on the ideals of classical liberalism? Is it possible to enjoy an enchanted world without succumbing to the brutality that has historically accompanied inter- and intra- religious conflict? And for secular moderns: will the new religion based on freedom/unfreedom prevent the world from descending into greater bloodshed or will it only create new infidels giving rise to and justifying new Crusades?

P.S.:

1. Join my weekly seminar on Threadable where we collectively gloss the book of Genesis.

2. Will Jarvis interviews me on religion and liberalism for Narratives.